Sky Full of Elephants by Cebo Campbell

BOOK REVIEW

Could this title be any cooler?

This is such a cleverly orchestrated novel, there are so many underlying themes but if you strip everything away it is the tender story of a father and daughter with a shared talent for healing, conjuring curses, coming to grips with their ever-evolving connection in the midst of great upheaval, and then characters who are at the heart of this post racial apocalyptic dazzling first novel.

In a linear suicide called “the event” when all white people of every age and every geographic location, on the same day and at the same time, walk into the nearest body of water and drown, I thought of how drowning, by its very nature of sheer helplessness, an inability to breathe until you just stop breathing, then what are we left with?

The author compels us to ask what happens when life changes in an instant, what happens next?

More specifically, as Cebo Campbell asks in this debut novel, what exactly are the consequences when half the population is erased?

Campbell attempts to answer these stirring questions in a mesmerising story about loss, gain, and identity.

The focus of the novel is Charlie Brunton, a solar and electrical power professor at Howard University navigating a variety of emotions numb to it all, unable to celebrate how everything has changed.

One afternoon his phone rings, he hears a voice say, “I’m Elizabeth’s daughter”. Elizabeth Waggoneer from his past, a brief romance that ended in a rape charge and then resulted in a daughter.

Charlie has never spoken with, seen, or thought about his daughter Sidney.

Sidney was the lone survivor of her white family and anxious to recapture normal, she has little interest in dethawing her relationship with her black father, but she is reaching out to Charlie as her only option.

This is a captivating near future fantasy, Campbell’s depiction of their trek across an altered and occasionally nightmarish southern landscape evokes Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and he caps the narrative with fascinating revelations about the cause of the event.