REVIEW: Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell

 

Easy to forget that half the world died. But then again, Charlie noted, neither grief nor calamity had ever stopped the joy of black people. We smiled through the worst the world had to offer, he thought. Smiled even when our lips bled. 

(Sky Full of Elephants, page 6)

Synopsis

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 his 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.

Format 304 pages, Hardcover
Published September 10, 2024 by Simon & Schuster
ISBN 9781668034927 (ISBN10: 1668034921)

About the Author

CEBO CAMPBELL is an award-winning, multi-hyphenate creative based in New York and London. He is a winner of the Stories Award for Poetry, and his writings are featured in numerous publications. As co-founder and CCO of the renowned NYC creative agency Spherical, Cebo leads teams of creatives in shaping the best hotel brands in the world. His range of talents as a creative director have sent him all over the globe infusing creativity, from working with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in the UK, to concepting the Million Miracles humanitarian campaign throughout Africa and India, to writing and directing the VR short film Refuge: Triumph in Tulsa, based on the famed Black Wall Street in Oklahoma. Cebo’s expansive work as a writer, designer, and director are powered by a singular mindset: contribute meaningfully to the culture. And he does. With everything he touches.

At present, Cebo is likely somewhere in Europe enjoying good whiskey and better conversation.

My Thoughts

Charlie Brunton is a Black man who has served time he didn't owe, sentenced for a crime he didn't commit. Now he's a professor living in a new world — one where every white person suddenly dropped everything they were doing and walked into the nearest body of water to drown themselves.

A year after this world-altering event, Charlie receives a phone call from the daughter he never knew he had. Sidney is a mixed-race girl raised in a white family and who has never had a relationship with her father. Yet, after a year of isolation, she reaches out asking for his help traveling south, where rumors are swirling about survivors building a new life.

Author Cebo Campbell has the heart of a poet, and his prose is a pleasure to read. A few passages I found especially moving:

Charlie put away every article in the house that made him feel as he did before all the oceans went from waving to wailing. (page 3)

Better to endure the ghosts outside than those in the heart. (page 23)

And this extended meditation on Blackness that is worth quoting in full:

We are the feeling folk, Charlie thought, who sparkle of magic and vigor. Who laugh like laughter is a gift to be given and sing like we have always been the chorus of angels. The feeling folk who allow the skin of the world to glide over us, rugged and tender, absorbed into the gospel of our empathies. The feeling folk who dance to songs in our heads because we know those songs source from a heart beating since the beginning. The feeling folk who heal right side in, wielding a power to make a history of horrors evaporate like steam from a stewpot. Power to make any place home. (p. 265)

Charlie and Sidney's drive south becomes a quiet, searching journey — two strangers learning who they are to each other and where they fit in this remade world. Once they arrive in Mobile, the tone of the book shifts noticeably. It takes on a mystical quality, a sense of intention and destiny that reminded me of The Celestine Prophecy. For a while, it works. But somewhere in the final hundred pages, that mysticism tips into something that felt a bit pretentious to me — the story straining under the weight of its own ambitions.

What the book does consistently well is exploring cultural difference, often in quietly pointed ways. In Chapter 25, Sidney finds herself at a loud group dinner in Mobile and contrasts it with her memories of restrained Thanksgiving gatherings with her white family, green bean casserole, and the quiet she'd assumed was universal. It's a small moment, but it lands.

The novel also doesn't shy away from heavier history. On Confederate monuments:

The monument reminded everyone in the city that some of its residents used to be somebody's property. A threat, Vivian understood, packaged as heritage. (p. 31)

On what it means to be Black in a white world:

His mother told him being black is being the villain in someone else's story. (p. 61)

These moments gave me a lot to sit with. I'll be honest — part of me resists the "us and them" framing. And yet the book makes a compelling case that we each carry a shared experience within our own culture, one that shapes us whether we claim it or not. Our ancestors' suffering, their guilt, their resilience — it doesn't disappear just because we personally weren't there. Collard greens and chitlins became soul food because Black Southerners learned to find joy in the scraps they were handed. That's culture born from survival. And every culture carries something like that — its own inheritance of beauty and brutality.

Some of my own ancestors did terrible things. That's not who I am, but it is part of the lineage I come from. Campbell's novel sits with that complexity rather than resolving it neatly, and that's to its credit.

Five words: thoughtful, mystical, outlandish, provoking, healing

Buy Now:

Simon & Schuster

My final word: The plot is a little outlandish, and the final stretch is a bit much. But the writing is sharp, the premise is imaginative, and the exploration of race, history, and identity in America is thoughtful and worthwhile. A worthy effort — well done, even when it reaches too far.

My Rating:

Trigger Warnings:

Mass suicide

---

The Cerebral Girl is a middle-aged blogger just digging her way out from under a mountain of books in the deep south of Florida.

Read-a-thon Spring 2026

 

It's that time of year! Time for the Spring Read-a-thon! I haven't been able to do one for awhile, but I'm hoping to be able to take some time to read today. As far as my reading list today:

• The Greek House by Dinah Jefferies
• Upward Bound by Woody Brown
• An Infinite Love Story by Chanel Cleeton

I'll be joined by two dogs and five cats, a comfy sofa, and lots of hot tea. Happy Reading!

REVIEW: Prequel: An American Fight Against Fascism by Rachel Maddow

Synopsis

Rachel Maddow traces the fight to preserve American democracy back to World War II, when a handful of committed public servants and brave private citizens thwarted far-right plotters trying to steer our nation toward an alliance with the Nazis.

Inspired by her research for the hit podcast Ultra, Rachel Maddow charts the rise of a wild American strain of authoritarianism that has been alive on the far-right edge of our politics for the better part of a century. Before and even after our troops had begun fighting abroad in World War II, a clandestine network flooded the country with disinformation aimed at sapping the strength of the U.S. war effort and persuading Americans that our natural alliance was with the Axis, not against it. It was a sophisticated and shockingly well-funded campaign to undermine democratic institutions, promote antisemitism, and destroy citizens’ confidence in their elected leaders, with the ultimate goal of overthrowing the U.S. government and installing authoritarian rule.

That effort worked—tongue and groove—alongside an ultra-right paramilitary movement that stockpiled bombs and weapons and trained for mass murder and violent insurrection.

At the same time, a handful of extraordinary activists and journalists were tracking the scheme, exposing it even as it was unfolding. In 1941 the U.S. Department of Justice finally made a frontal attack, identifying the key plotters, finding their backers, and prosecuting dozens in federal court.

None of it went as planned.

While the scheme has been remembered in history—if at all—as the work of fringe players, in reality, it involved a large number of some of the country’s most influential elected officials. Their interference in law enforcement efforts against the plot is a dark story of the rule of law bending and then breaking under the weight of political intimidation.

That failure of the legal system had consequences. The tentacles of that unslain beast have reached forward into our history for decades. But the heroic efforts of the activists, journalists, prosecutors, and regular citizens who sought to expose the insurrectionists also make for a deeply resonant, deeply relevant tale in our own disquieting times.

Format 416 pages, Hardcover
Published October 17, 2023 by Crown
ISBN 9780593444511 (ISBN10: 0593444515)

About the Author

Rachel Maddow is host of the Emmy Award–winning Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC, as well as the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power; Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth; and Bag Man: The Wild Crimes, Audacious Cover-Up, and Spectacular Downfall of a Brazen Crook in the White House. Maddow received a bachelor’s degree in public policy from Stanford University and earned her doctorate in political science at Oxford University. She lives in New York City and Massachusetts with her partner, artist Susan Mikula.

Check out the author's website

My Thoughts

"History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes."

They say that history doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes. Reading Rachel Maddow's Prequel, that old adage lands with uncomfortable, clarifying force. The America of the 1930s had Senator Huey Long — loud, brash, barnstorming, and brimming with populist promises — and the resonance with our own era of bombastic political theater is impossible to dismiss. Maddow doesn't make that parallel clumsily. She doesn't need to. The evidence, laid out with the precision of a seasoned researcher and historian, speaks for itself.

Let me start by saying that this review will differ a little from past reviews. It is too weighty, too important to write a simple "book review", for we find ourselves on the precipice between democracy and fascism and must make a choice — will we uphold democracy or fall into the pit of fascism?

Prequel tells the story of a far-right authoritarian impulse that has run through the veins of American political life for nearly a hundred years. In the 1930s, coinciding with Hitler's rise in Europe, a coordinated movement pushed hard for fascism here at home. Groups stockpiled weapons and explosives in preparation for an insurrection. Government officials worked in coordination with foreign actors. A fascist-sympathetic narrative was amplified through official and unofficial channels alike. This was not fringe paranoia — it was organized, resourced, and frighteningly close to succeeding and included a complex cast of characters. From American citizens like Viereck who doubled as a Nazi agent to Louisiana Governor and later State Senator Huey Long (a very Trumpian bloviate), and with the zealous support of Americans like Laura Ingalls (not THAT Laura Ingalls!), an accomplished female pilot and paid Nazi agent who dropped fascist pamphlets from the air onto Washington D.C., and dozens of others who worked in a coordinated effort to infiltrate the heart of democracy and tear it down from the inside.

What is remarkable — and what gives this book its most urgent energy — is the story of who stopped it. Not always the institutions we might hope to rely on. Where the American legal system faltered, journalists and activists filled the breach. Investigators, reporters, and citizens took up the banner of democracy through dogged, unglamorous work. Journalists risked imprisonment, legal experts used the judicial system to fight any way they could, citizens shared information they had gathered with government and legal officials who were in a position to do something to fight the fascist attack on the pillars of democracy.

This is where Maddow's particular genius comes into its own. She is a master of the long connective thread — drawing bright lines between the events of the past and the present without letting the comparison become reductive or cheap. Prequel teaches us what was learned the last time democracy faced this kind of pressure: where the weaknesses are, what held, and — critically — what it will take to hold again. She identifies the strongholds. She maps the vulnerabilities. She makes a history lesson feel like a field guide.

The book is also, simply, a pleasure to read. Maddow brings to the page the same qualities that made her a formidable broadcaster: the ability to take deeply complex, document-heavy material and render it not just comprehensible but genuinely gripping. Her research is formidable. Her journalistic integrity is evident on every page. And her storytelling instincts transform what might otherwise be a dry historical account into something that reads with the momentum of a thriller. The result is a text that is at once a celebration — democracy was fought for and, in that moment, successfully defended — and a warning.

Five words: well-researched, immersive, inspirational, terrifying, alarming

Buy Now:

Get your copy

My final word: This book is well researched, well documented, and well written. Maddow is a master storyteller handing us a guide for the fight ahead of us. The impulse toward authoritarianism did not dissolve with the defeat of fascism abroad; it went quiet, regrouped, and waited. Democracy is once again under attack from the inside, and Prequel makes the case — calmly, rigorously, without hysteria — that this is not unprecedented, that it has been faced before, and that it can be faced again. This is a siren call.

Don't give up the fight. Don't let the bastards grind you down.

My Rating:

---

The Cerebral Girl is a middle-aged blogger just digging her way out from under a mountain of books in the deep south of Florida.

REVIEW: Happy Land by Dolen Perkins-Valdez

Synopsis

In the hills of Appalachia, there once was a kingdom...

Nikki hasn't seen her grandmother in years. So when the elder calls out of the blue with an urgent request for Nikki to visit her in the hills of western North Carolina, Nikki hesitates for only a moment. After years of silence in her family due to a mysterious estrangement between her mother and grandmother, she's determined to learn the truth while she still can.

But instead of giving answers about the recent past, Mother Rita tells Nikki an incredible story of a kingdom on this very mountain, and of her great-great-great-grandmother Luella, who would become its queen. 

It sounds like the makings of a fairy tale-- royalty among a community of freedpeople. But the more Nikki learns about the Kingdom of the Happy Land and the lives of those who dwelled in the ruins she discovers in the woods, the more she realizes how much of her identity and her family's secrets are wrapped up in these hills. Because this land is their legacy, and it will be up to her to protect it before it, like so much else, is stolen away.

Inspired by true events, Happy Land is a transporting multigenerational novel about the stories that shape us and the dazzling courage it takes to dream.

Format 368 pages, Hardcover
Published April 8, 2025 by Berkley
ISBN 9780593337721 (ISBN10: 0593337727)

About the Author

Dolen Perkins-Valdez is the New York Times bestselling author of Wench (2010), Balm (2015), Take My Hand (2022), and most recently Happy Land (2025). Take My Hand was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Newsweek, San Francisco Chronicle, Essence, NBC News, and elsewhere. The novel was a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award and named a Top 20 Book of the Year by the Editors at Amazon.  It was awarded the 2023 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work-Fiction and the 2023 BCALA Award for Fiction. The audiobook version of Take My Hand was named a Best of 2022 by Audible. Happy Land appeared on many "Most Anticipated" lists for 2025, including People, Elle, Reader's Digest, Woman's World, and elsewhere.

The American Bar Association recently awarded Take My Hand its prestigious Silver Gavel Award which recognizes an "outstanding work that fosters the American public's understanding of law and the legal system."

In 2011, Wench was a finalist for two NAACP Image Awards and the Hurston-Wright Legacy Award for fiction, and in 2017, HarperCollins released Wench as one of eight "Olive Titles," limited edition modern classics that included books by Edward P. Jones, Louise Erdrich, and Zora Neale Hurston.

Dolen has established herself as a pre-eminent chronicler of American historical life.  In 2013, she wrote the introduction to a special edition of Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave, published by Simon & Schuster, which became a New York Times bestseller. She followed that with an introduction to Elizabeth Keckly's Behind the Scenes, published in 2016, and the forthcoming 75th anniversary of George Orwell's 1984 which will be published by Penguin Random House in 2023.

Dolen is a three-time nominee for a United States Artists Fellowship and is currently Associate Professor in the Literature Department at American University and lives in Washington, DC with her family.

Learn more about the author

My Thoughts

Our Land

We should have a land of sun, 

Of gorgeous sun, 

And a land of fragrant water

Where the twilight is a soft bandanna handkerchief

Of rose and gold, 

And not this land

Where life is cold.

We should have a land of trees,

Of tall thick trees,

Bowed down with chattering parrots

Brilliant as the day,

And not this land where birds are gray.

Ah, we should have a land of joy,

Of love and joy and wine and song,

And not this land where joy is wrong.

-- Langston Hughes

The story of Happy Land is inspired by actual "intentional communities" formed by freed slaves who, after securing their freedom, faced violent persecution by the Ku Klux Klan. Told across a split timeline, the novel follows Luella and the Montgomery brothers in the 1800s alongside their modern-day descendants, who are now fighting to hold onto the land their ancestors built.

The story opens with present-day Nikki visiting her grandmother, Mother Rita, at her home in the North Carolina Blue Ridge Mountains. Approaching forty, Nikki barely knows the woman. Her own mother left the mountains long ago to build a life elsewhere and rarely brought Nikki back to visit. Now, summoned by her grandmother without explanation, Nikki answers the call hoping to uncover what drove a wedge between her mother and grandmother all those years ago. Instead of answers, Mother Rita offers her something else entirely — the story of their people, of a queen, and of the land over which she ruled.

"We was owned by a white man by the name of Bobo. To say that he did not kill us was to give him a compliment of sorts."

The dual timelines alternate between Nikki in the present and Luella in the past. We meet Luella at twenty, newly freed alongside her father and settled in a nearby town. She is sharp, loyal, and regal. Her father, a minister, has established a church among fellow freed slaves when the Montgomery brothers — William and Robert — join the congregation. As the Klan tightens its grip on South Carolina, the congregation agrees to follow William north into North Carolina, eventually finding a large plot of land to work and eventually buy in the Blue Ridge Mountains. There, they build more than a settlement. They build a kingdom.

"I'm saying we make this place a kingdom, just like back in Africa. I'm saying we need to claim our royal robes."

William, a visionary and storyteller, draws on the history and legacy of African rulers to inspire his people. He urges them to create something that reaches back to the old country — a reminder of who they were and who they still are. Together, they establish a community treasury, a governing committee, and a shared identity. The people choose William as their king, and William chooses Luella as his queen. The Kingdom of Happy Land grows, prospers, and endures — through decades of love and joy, hardship and loss.

"...But one thing we always knew was that we lived a life in that other land across the ocean before we was brought here in the dark of ships and worked to death. So we made something here on this mountain, something to remind us of who we used to be before they tried to kill us."

In the present, their descendants are fighting to hold on to the very land that fed, sheltered, and shaped their ancestors. As that battle unfolds, Nikki deepens her bond with Mother Rita and works to heal the long fracture between her grandmother and mother — all while coming to understand that she is the great-great-great-granddaughter of a queen.

Five words: Inspiring, heartfelt, rooted, resonant, ancestral

Buy Now:

Purchase through the author's website

My final word: I loved this book! The author has a remarkable gift for humanizing her characters — laying them bare, rendering them complicated, and refusing to reduce anyone to simply "good" or "bad." The way she threads the past into the present is both graceful and powerful, reminding us that we are products of those who came before us and that our histories are not so distant as we might think. Luella was born to be a queen, and Mother Rita is her great-grandchild through and through.

"But what it mean to be a woman, Ma?"

"It mean when it come time to make a decision, you step right up to it. It mean when life send you hardship, you go to bed and get up the next morning to face it."

"And if I don't?"

"Then you leave it to God."

Trigger Warnings:

Abuse, miscarriage, domestic violence, slavery

My Rating:

 

---

The Cerebral Girl is a middle-aged blogger just digging her way out from under a mountain of books in the deep south of Florida.

I received a copy of this book to review through BookBrowse, in exchange for my honest opinion. I was not financially compensated in any way, and the opinions expressed are my own and based on my observations while reading this novel. 

REVIEW: Best Offer Wins by Marisa Kashino

 

Synopsis

An insanely competitive housing market. A desperate buyer on the edge. In Marisa Kashino’s darkly humorous debut novel, Best Offer Wins, the white picket fence becomes the ultimate symbol of success—and obsession. How far would you go for the house of your dreams?

Eighteen months and 11 lost bidding wars into house-hunting in the overheated Washington, DC suburbs, 37-year-old publicist Margo Miyake gets a tip about the perfect house, in the perfect neighborhood, slated to come up for sale in one month. Desperate to escape the cramped apartment she shares with her husband Ian — and in turn, get their marriage, plan to have a baby, and whole life back on track — Margo becomes obsessed with buying the house before it’s publicly listed and the masses descend (with unbeatable, all-cash offers in hand).

A little stalking? Harmless. A bit of trespassing? Necessary. As Margo infiltrates the homeowners’ lives, her tactics grow increasingly unhinged—but just when she thinks she’s won them over, she hits a snag in her plan. Undeterred, Margo will prove again and again that there’s no boundary she won’t cross to seize the dream life she’s been chasing. The most unsettling part? You’ll root for her, even as you gasp in disbelief.

Dark, biting, and laugh-out-loud funny, Best Offer Wins is a propulsive debut and a razor-sharp exploration of class, ambition, and the modern housing crisis.

Format 288 pages, Hardcover
Published November 25, 2025 by Celadon Books
ISBN 9781250400543

About the Author

Author information from Goodreads

I'm Marisa Kashino. I was a journalist for seventeen years, most recently at The Washington Post. But I spent the bulk of my career at Washingtonian magazine, writing long-form features and overseeing the real estate and home design coverage. I grew up near Seattle, graduating from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism and political science. These days, I live in the DC area with my husband, two dogs, and two cats, all rescues (the animals, not the husband). Best Offer Wins is my first novel.

Follow me on social media at:

Instagram @marisakashino

TikTok @marisa.kashino

My Thoughts

There is a special kind of frustration that comes from reading a novel with an interesting premise and competent prose, only to find yourself thoroughly repelled by nearly everyone inhabiting its pages. Marisa Kashino's Best Offer Wins is, regrettably, that kind of book.

The writing itself is serviceable enough. The author has a competent command of pacing and scene-setting, and there are moments where the story moves along with enough momentum to keep the pages turning. Technically speaking, she can write. The problem is not the craft — it is the people she has populated this story with.

The protagonist is, to put it plainly, a remarkably difficult person to spend a novel with and highly unlikable. Selfish, manipulative, and possessed of a seemingly bottomless capacity for self-pity, she navigates her circumstances by playing the victim at every turn while simultaneously making choices that are frequently maddening and occasionally preposterous. Rooting for her proves nearly impossible. Readers willing to extend considerable suspension of disbelief may find more patience for her craziness than I could muster.

The supporting cast offers little relief. The husband is spineless to the point of parody, a man so thoroughly without backbone that his presence in any scene becomes its own source of minor irritation. The boss grates in a different but equally persistent way. Character after character reveals themselves to be primarily self-serving or annoyingly ingratiating, and the cumulative effect is something close to exhaustion. I found it difficult to care what happened to any of them.

Thankfully, there are at least two bright spots. Young Penny is the one character in the book who inspires anything resembling joy or warmth. And the dog. Fritter manages to emerge with dignity intact, while leaving me a little sad that these people were all that poor dog had in its life.

Five words: frustrating, annoying, dark, farfetched, silly

Buy Now:

MacMillan

My final word: Best Offer Wins is not without its readable qualities, and Kashino's technical abilities suggest she is capable of better work. But a novel lives or dies on its characters, and this one is populated almost entirely by people you would cross the street to avoid. Mediocre in ambition and frustrating in execution, it is the kind of read that leaves you grateful, at least, that it did not last longer. 

Thank Heavens for that dog.

My Rating:

---

The Cerebral Girl is a middle-aged blogger just digging her way out from under a mountain of books in the deep south of Florida.