-
Access Our
Most Anticipated
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reading Guide | Discuss | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
A Novel
by Cebo Campbell
Book Reviewed by:In a world without white people, what does it mean to be black?
One day, a cataclysmic event occurs: all of the white people in America walk into the nearest body of water. A year later, Charlie Brunton is a Black man living in an entirely new world. Having served time in prison for a wrongful conviction, he's now a professor of electric and solar power systems at Howard University when he receives a call from someone he wasn't even sure existed: his daughter Sidney, a nineteen-year-old left behind by her white mother and step-family.
Traumatized by the event, and terrified of the outside world, Sidney has spent a year in isolation in Wisconsin. Desperate for help, she turns to the father she never met, a man she has always resented. Sidney and Charlie meet for the first time as they embark on a journey across a truly "post-racial" America in search for answers. But neither of them are prepared for this new world and how they see themselves in it.
Heading south toward what is now called the Kingdom of Alabama, everything Charlie and Sidney thought they knew about themselves, and the world, will be turned upside down. Brimming with heart and humor, Cebo Campbell's astonishing debut novel is about the power of community and connection, about healing and self-actualization, and a reckoning with what it means to be Black in America, in both their world and ours.
Is it believable in a speculative novel that negotiates both racial ambiguity and racial anxiety that Alabama is separated from its past trauma of Jim Crow, George Wallace, and the White Citizens' Council? That segregation-inducing poverty, white nationalism, and lack of opportunities would give way to a black monarchy? In this suspension of disbelief, Campbell has crafted a king and a kingdom that is the antithesis of everything Alabama offers in historical narratives. The poet Rumi wrote that miracles swell in the invisible, but this isn't a story about miracles. It's about what racial politics fail to address: Who are we beneath the color of our skin? Does black identity feed off the host of white existence? Is it refracted in white light? If white people are gone, what do black people know about themselves? I found the story itself evocative, but the execution is its real triumph. Campbell borders on poetic with his prose; it's simply beautiful to read...continued
Full Review
(1140 words)
(Reviewed by Valerie Morales).
One of the first scenes in Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell takes place in Professor Charlie Brunton's lecture hall at Howard University. Howard is one of the oldest HBCUs (historically black colleges and universities), founded in 1867. Located in Washington, D.C., it has over the decades been a space safe from racial taunts and cruelty, microaggressions, and discrimination. In Campbell's novel, Professor Brunton inspires his students at a time when all the white people in the country have died in a mass suicide known as "the event." By default, HBCUs have become the de facto breeding ground for intellectual, spiritual, and social life.
Howard is joyful. "People laughed loud and broke out into little dances. They'd see a friend...
If you liked Sky Full of Elephants, try these:
by Afia Atakora
Published 2021
A mother and daughter with a shared talent for healing - and for the conjuring of curses - are at the heart of this dazzling first novel.
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Published 2020
In his boldly imagined first novel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, the National Book Award–winning author of Between the World and Me, brings home the most intimate evil of enslavement: the cleaving and separation of families.
Asale Angel-Ajani, author of A Country You Can Leave
Part Afrofuturism, part delicious fever dream, a lost father and his fractured daughter set out on a road trip toward a misunderstood utopia that reveals the sacred wisdom of who they are and the significance of their people. Cebo Campbell is a master griot, reordering the world with grace, beauty, and deep humanity. Sky Full of Elephants is a thrilling, original work that allows us to look deeply at each other and ask if 'white ain't an idea no more,' what are the unlimited possibilities for the idea of black?
