Shahara’Tova's Reviews > Sky Full of Elephants

** spoiler alert ** When I first began reading, I was intrigued. Writers have written about a world without whiteness and white people before, but I wondered how the author would tackle this concept. The best part of this book is the first 50-100 pages. In a version of a post-apocalypse, black people are surviving and thriving in a new life without racism and oppression. There’s community building and a love of neighbors. However, the main character is confronted with a perplexing issue in this new America: he has a daughter he’s never met who wants him to drive her to Orange Beach where she is told people like her still exist. White people. White presenting, bi-racial people. Ultimately, this story boils down to a biracial child who is fighting against her blackness and longing for whiteness and white society that doesn’t exist, if it ever really did. Once the premise of the story became clear, the novelty of the plot started to wear thin almost immediately. Traveling from the Midwest to the Deep South, the writer crafts images of blackness that are both resilient and resigned. There’s even a character with a different identity who is accepted by their father and becomes a good friend. Their time in the book isn’t nearly enough though. All of the conversations and interactions are an effort to prove or rather convince this child that her family and blackness is good enough and special. She doesn’t need to seek out a facade in Orange Beach. It gets old really fast.

The majority of the action centers Mardi Gras in Mobile, Al which sets itself up as the new black Utopia with a King and Queen that the outside world fears, but they really are the cause of the “event” in the first place. There are some flashbacks to an earlier period when the King and Queen are in Haiti and when they first come to Mobile, but those connections aren’t clear until later in the book. In the end, the closer to the end of the book you get, the more the racial identity crisis wears on the reader. This is one of those books that you can either love or hate, but ultimately there’s too much flowery language, dragging plot, and diversions that ultimately distract from the story.

I left the book wondering why the book ended the way it did, with father and daughter still estranged yet “connected through thoughts? , but I also didn’t need this story to tell me that blackness is powerful and beautiful and enough. In the end, there are some great moments in the book, but it wasn’t enough for me.