QUICK REVIEW: Upward Bound by Woody Brown

 

Synopsis

Upward Bound is not a place anyone dreams of spending their days. The dreary adult daycare center for Los Angeles's disabled community is, for many of its clients and staff, a place of last resort. This includes Carlos, a young aide who lost his mother as a boy and now works there alongside his beloved sister Mariana; Jorge, the gentle nonspeaking giant whom Carlos seeks to befriend (and prevent from escaping); Tom, a beautiful young man with cerebral palsy, who pines for Ann, the summer lifeguard at the center's pool who feels out of her depth; then there's Dave, Upward Bound’s director who came to L.A. to pursue an acting career but now channels his passion into staging an overly ambitious holiday show starring the center's irrepressible clients. Framing these intertwined narratives—and connecting them in surprising, shattering ways—is the riveting and sometimes ironic testimony of Walter, a recent community college graduate who, after a family tragedy, must return to the company of his disabled peers.

In Upward Bound, Woody Brown has created an indelible, authentic, and profoundly moving group portrait of autism and other disabilities, all illuminated by his empathy, sly sense of humor, and enormous gifts as a novelist. With remarkable sophistication, insight, and creativity, Brown depicts a community too-often invisible in literature and society. Filled with characters you won't soon forget, Upward Bound will inspire and touch you, teaching you as much about yourself as the tender, miraculous world behind the center's doors.

Format 208 pages, Hardcover
Published March 31, 2026 by Hogarth
ISBN 9780593979976 (ISBN10: 0593979974)

My Thoughts

The story unfolds through the first-person perspectives of both patients and workers at an adult day care center — a world that doesn't often find its way into fiction, and one that turns out to be quietly rich with humanity.

What makes it work is the angle. Rather than observing these characters from the outside, you're dropped directly into their inner lives — their small victories, their frustrations, their moments of unexpected connection. It feels fresh in a literary landscape where the same settings and storylines seem to recycle endlessly.

That said, don't go in expecting a page-turner. Upward Bound is not a story that grabs you by the collar. It's more of a gentle companion — the kind of listen you settle into rather than race through. As an audiobook it worked particularly well for that reason, fitting naturally into quieter moments of the day.

My final word: Upward Bound took me by surprise with its setting and approach. It won't be the most thrilling thing you listen to this year, but it's a genuinely pleasant diversion with more substance than you might expect. Sometimes that's exactly what you need.

My Rating:

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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: Wait for Me by Amy Jo Burns

 

Synopsis

From the author of Mercury and Shiner comes a novel about the bond between two female folk singers, the love stories that haunt them, and the music that brings them together to burn bright.

Young folk singer Elle Harlow reaches the height of her prowess in 1973, with two wildly beloved albums to her name and a hidden history of impossible heartbreak. When she sets foot on the famed Grand Ole Opry stage, a far cry from the mountain that raised her, Elle gives the biggest performance of her life. Then, to the dismay of shocked fans, her producer, and the man who still loves her, she vanishes.

Almost two decades later, eighteen-year-old Marijohn Shaw is spending her summer pumping gas, writing songs on her broken mandolin, and longing for a mother. Her father, Abe, has always sworn he was the last person to see Elle Harlow alive, but when a meteor strikes the woods of their sleepy Pennsylvania town and a piece of Elle’s past emerges from the wreckage, the truth of her disappearance sets fire to everything Marijohn believes about herself, her music, and her ability to love with abandon.

Wait for Me exalts the lush hills of Appalachia and the bright lights of Nashville as it reveals the legacy of Elle Harlow, the bold voice that defined her, the intimate betrayal that undid her, and the unexpected faith of another young woman determined to resurrect her.

Format 336 pages, Hardcover
Published March 3, 2026 by Celadon Books
ISBN 9781250399304 (ISBN10: 1250399300)

About the Author

Amy Jo’s new novel, Wait for Me, is the Today Show Read With Jenna pick for March 2026. She is the author of three other books, including Cinderland, Shiner, and Mercury, which was a Barnes & Noble Book Club Pick, a People Magazine Book of the Week, and an Editor’s Choice selection in The New York Times. A western Pennsylvania native, she lives in New Jersey with her family.

You can find her on Instagram at @burnsamyjo.

Find her website at Amy Jo Burns

My Thoughts

Wait for Me by Amy Jo Burns is a little dreamy and strange, but mostly enjoyable. 

"People passed through her like water through a sieve"

Elle Harlow is a woman forged by hardship. Raised by a father who grieved the healthy son he never had, she became the next best thing — hunting, providing, holding the family together when he left for war, and tending to a sickly brother with the hands of a healer. 

But Elle's truest language was music, and it was through bluegrass and the music of her small mountain community where she said what she couldn't otherwise.

Wait for Me winds through the decades, tracing the arc of a woman who briefly captured the attention of the music industry before vanishing just as suddenly as she appeared. Decades later, her story becomes entangled with that of Mary John — an aspiring musician and songwriter living motherless in the world.

Burns offers up a unique storyline that has an almost magical quality to it — moments that feel suspended just slightly outside of ordinary reality, as if the characters exist in a world where the rules are just a bit more elastic than our own. This dreamlike atmosphere is one of the book's strongest assets, and it carries you through the slower stretches with a kind of gentle momentum.

That said, the plot does occasionally veer into territory that strains credibility. There are a handful of moments that require a fairly generous suspension of disbelief — situations that felt too convenient or too far-fetched, even by the novel's own internal logic. It doesn't derail the experience entirely, but it does make it difficult to fully lose yourself in the story at times.

If you're listening to the audiobook — and honestly, that might be the best way to experience this one — you're in for a treat on the production front. The narrators do a commendable job bringing the characters to life, finding distinct voices that make it easy to track who's who. What really sets this audiobook apart, though, is the inclusion of actual musical snippets: songs written and performed by the characters are woven right into the listening experience. It's a really nice touch that adds texture to the story and makes the music feel real rather than imagined. It's the kind of detail that elevates the format beyond simply "someone reading a book aloud."

Five words: dreamlike, wistful, unique, incredulous, gentle

Buy Now

Buy on Audible

My final word: Overall, Wait for Me is a pleasant and mostly satisfying read — or listen. It won't necessarily blow your mind, but it's a worthwhile journey if you're in the mood for something with a bit of magic, a unique premise, and the willingness to go along for the ride even when things get a little hard to believe.

My Rating:

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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.

World Book Day 2026

 
As far as I'm concerned, every day should be World Book Day. I love books. I love the feel of them, the weight of them, the look of them on a shelf. Their fonts, their edges, their colorful covers. The worlds they permit you to visit, the other lives for you to live. I've said before that there are so many people that I hear speak and think that they just need to read a book. Their minds are so small; their thinking so limited. Read a book, any book. It doesn't have to be a history book or science book or the biography of an important figure. You can learn something from just about any book. They open doors to other worlds, to other cultures. No matter what you read, it's inevitable that you will learn something. Maybe it's just a new word, maybe it's geography, a skill you didn't know existed before. You'll learn something, expand your mind, learn that there's a whole world outside of that little corner that you live in. 

Read a book. Read a book to yourself, read a book to a child. Share a book with a friend or neighbor. Join a book club. Just do it. Just read.

Happy World Book Day

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

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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!