Emily's Reviews > Sky Full of Elephants: A Novel

Three stars, knocked down to two stars because Sidney left Fula in Orange Beach. She just drove away! I thought she was going to drive around in the truck and have big feelings for an hour and then come back and get him but she abandoned him in Whitepeoplesville overnight and forever. Sidney... Sidney! There is one place left where young Black men are still not safe in America, and Sidney just drove away like, "See ya, unresolved plot line!"

Charles, in the king's bedroom: "Don't do the thing!"
Nona: "Charles, it is your choice whether to do the thing."
Charles: "I'm going to do the thing!"

I'm writing this the week after the 2024 election and all us white people can walk into the sea any day now. The true and inevitable alternative is that climate change is going to bring the sea to the white people because of what we've wrought. The tragedy is that everybody else is going in the sea too.

But the premise of this book, that white people walk purposefully into the sea, leaving all the other peoples of America? North America? parts of North and South America? to live their best life and reinvent the world without capitalism! Love it!

I was interested in the way that systems would be maintained in the absence of white people, because I've met equal amounts of people of color and fat white guys named Dave in the water treatment industry, but Sky Full of Elephants in not science fiction in the sense that the author doesn't get into the science of what's happening.

There's a dearth of skilled workers, and Charles, who understands systems, is a professor at Howard because he's needed. But then his daughter whom he's never met, contacts him, and Charles drives to Wisconsin to get Sidney, who needs a ride to Orange Beach, AL because her aunt left a note saying that she should come. This scenario is already kind of a mess. Sidney lives in Oshkosh, WI and hasn't left her family's property since her family walked into the lake. (Where is Sidney's drinking water coming from?) She’s been home for a year, but her aunt didn't wait for Sidney to come down and open the door so they could go to Alabama together? It's not like her aunt had a lot of options for traveling companions. Also, of course Sidney is traveling to Alabama to be with her aunt. Sidney alone in Wisconsin has no way of knowing that Orange Beach is the wannabe white people colony except her aunt’s cryptic note, until people in Mobile tell her, but then she’s blamed for wanting to be with the wannabe whites. And she does? Or does she? Suddenly Sidney wants to immerse herself in a white tourist town. Or does she? Her motivations are a mess.

(The author gets Wisconsin wrong. It's not the vibe. There's an underestimation of the number of lakes. And Sidney's aunt is a woman from a Southern country club. A Wisconsin aunt could never talk like that.)

Sidney and Charles make their way to Chicago, because who knows what the EV charging station situation is like on the way to Alabama. Chicago is a bustling, beautiful, bountiful borough with a functioning airport and enough Black pilots that Charles finds the rogue one and makes a deal with him: Sailor will fly Charles and Sidney as close as he can to Alabama, and Charles will help Sailor steal a tanker full of airplane fuel so that Sailor can commandeer an airport. Deal. We're definitely on a road trip/quest here. Except after the plane lands, our heroes get kidnapped and taken to Mobile, AL to meet the king and queen. It’s not a quest anymore and nothing new happens. It's convenient when you get to a new place and you immediately get accepted into the royal court and your new FWB lets you stay in her room. Beats apartment hunting.

Sidney just does not develop as a character. She goes from outright racism all the time to the racism flaring up occasionally, but as far as being a person, she reads as too authentic for fiction and too boring for fiction. She's nineteen. She is so nineteen. She is entirely the kind of person that would read the Dharma Bums and start getting really into Buddhism if she'd gone to college and not watched her family die in a lake. The author spends too much time in Sidney's head but he doesn't know enough about nineteen year old girls questioning their identity for Sidney's thoughts to seem interesting on paper. Sidney reacts. She admires herself in the mirror. She has a crush on a boy. She makes friends with kids her age. She's nineteen. And when she gets in that truck... why would Charlie assume that the radio machine would bring her home? She's a nineteen year old kid with twenty minutes of driving practice and she drove off angry. Ocam's Razor says she's in a ditch somewhere. Her end of the story isn't an end. The end is when she drives back to Mobile and everyone's worried sick about her, except Fula whose truck she stole. What is the end? Is Raymond's theory correct? Why did Charles choose to turn on the machine again? Why was there so much exposition with no answers? What's happening in Europe? What's happening in Africa? Is Zu planning on staying in Mobile? They seemed to like being a flight attendant. Why monarchy? Is this monarchy hereditary? Why abolish capitalism and bring back monarchy?

J. said the first novel is like the first waffle. I would happily read Cebo Campbell's next book.