SOURCE: Holt, Patricia. “King and I.” San Francisco Chronicle (19 April 1998): C1.

In the following review, Holt argues that Dreamer is a “monumentally important” novel, praising the work for its treatment of the doppelganger theme and its philosophical insights on Martin Luther King Jr.

Seattle novelist Charles Johnson could not have taken a greater or more audacious risk following his National Book Award-winning novel, Middle Passage (1990), than to create a fictional Martin Luther King Jr. as protagonist of the simply named but monumentally important Dreamer.

Johnson, Pollock professor of English at the University of Washington, takes us so deeply inside the mind of King that we don't doubt for a moment we're in the presence of the real Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) crusade in riot-torn Chicago circa 1966.

By this time, King's methods are seen “as outmoded, his insistence on loving one's enemies as lunacy, his opposition to (the...