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.