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

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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!

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

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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:

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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.