Chrissie Whitley's Reviews > Sky Full of Elephants

2.5 stars

A speculative fiction novel with dashes of science fiction, dystopian, and magical realism — all wrapped up in a road trip book of sorts. When Sky Full of Elephants begins, we are one year out from a large-scale mass suicide — with no warning one day all the white people in the United States turned and walked themselves into the nearest body of water and drowned.

Charlie Brunton gets a call from the biracial daughter he's never met, who has grown up with her white mother and step-family in Wisconsin. Sidney, calling on the favor of his biological relationship, all but demands he drive to her in Wisconsin and then take her to Alabama, where she believes there is a colony of the few remaining white people.

In typical roadtrip fashion, they stop a few places, meet new people, and head to Alabama. But in Campbell's construct there are some key differences as a result of the sudden and swift absence of white people. The power grid is spotty across the country, and when they arrive at Chicago O'Hare they learn of the new rules that are in place: no money is needed or exchanged, there are no schedules for planes, taking a ticket allows you to stay for seven days in the airport itself, but if you leave you can't return for thirty days. On top of that, Alabama has been sealed off and gained a king to rule over it. There is a no-fly zone over the entire state, so it's up to Charlie and Sidney to persuade a pilot (named Sailor, no doubt) to fly them as close as possible. From there they drive into the Kingdom of Alabama and discover an entirely different way of living than one they ever dreamed of before.

I love the concept of this novel — loved it from the summary, and I even love the part I laid out above in the preceding paragraph. But beyond the vaguest sense of the story there, I struggled the entire time with plot hole after plot hole, oversimplified characters and situations, and a utopia installed, when I emphatically believe utopias are not truly possible. While the story does a good job exploring identity through Sidney and Charlie, there was not nearly enough time or space spent with these two so they could build a relationship. For the majority of the second half, they were hardly even in the same room together.

In the end, I felt that Campbell broke the unspoken pact between reader and storyteller on too many points — the ground was absolutely littered with countless Chekhov's guns — and he missed the opportunity for a deeper exploration of the themes on which he touched. However, I read the review in Medium, and I happily agree with Zachary Houle in that I look forward to the books to come that this will no doubt inspire.

I received this book for free from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This affected neither my opinion of the book nor the content of my review.