CLOUD CUCKOO LAND is the latest of Anthony Doerr’s incredible works of fiction- this will surely be one of my favorite reads of 2021 and will stay with me for a long time.

CLOUD CUCKOO LAND is hard to adequately describe- it transcends space and time, hops between narratives, countries, time periods- it features heartfelt, interweaving storylines; complex, imperfect characters; richly detailed settings; and universal themes of love, loss, adventure, hope, perseverance, and the power of a great story. I would highly recommend this book to all- particularly to fans of Doerr’s other work- and would encourage any readers to push through the first 50 or so pages, during which it can be tricky to juggle all the perspectives.

Overall, this book was an unforgettable read for me that felt timely and yet timeless.

Thank you to Scribner and NetGalley for the ARC which I kindly received in exchange for my honest review.

I never read the author's first book, so I cannot compare the book as many others have done. The descriptions given are wonderful. The characters are insanely relatable. I did not like the order of the chapters because it became quite confusing. There were constant pauses to understand what time frame I was on and who was narrating. I felt like I was powering through the book in order to finish it. There was nothing keeping me attached to reading and many times, I picked up another book and finished it before continuing with this one. The ending is nice but it is not a page turner for me.

I was a little worried picking up „Cloud Cuckoo Land“ since a book worthy of following the wonderful „All The Light We Cannot See“ just seemed a gigantic feat but Anthony Doerr delivered. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a book I’ll remember, recommend and gift. It is a truly great book.
It is an ode to home and to books and libraries – so my very favorite places.
Five protagonists, from 15th century Constantinople to Idaho, the war in Korea, Idaho again, than to a space ship may seem like a wild ride but it‘s a wild ride well worth taking ! Through its exploration of loss, heroism and destiny, Cloud Cuckoo Land even manages to grapple with the climate crisis and humankind’s culpability, in a beautiful and ultimately hopeful way – which makes me want to put this book into my teenagers hands right away.
Each of the five main characters in the novel has a relationship with a librarian or a broader definition of what a librarian can be, a custodian of books or gatekeeper in some way. The book is unabashedly celebrating the power of books and their caretakers providing access to the written word and the story contained – a tribute to the magic of reading and storytelling.

A true masterwork of fiction. One of the absolute best books of the year! A lyrical, beautiful, emotional, and captivating love letter to the power of storytelling and a tribute to those who preserve and pass the stories on and the threads of these stories that connect us and bind us across time. Anthony Doerr writes so magnificently that you feel shame about anything you’ve ever written. This book is just brilliant! Read it!

What seems to be an unpopular opinion, I did not love this book and really struggled to get through it. I found that there were too many perspectives, too many characters and unnecessarily wordy and descriptive. Although all perspectives are connected, they did not feel connected while reading the book, in fact it felt like reading multiple different stories, which at times became confusing. I loved All the Light We Cannot See, but this just did not live up to my expectations.

Anna, an orphan, who lives in Constantinople, finds and reads the story of Aethon, while a great siege occurs outside her home. Omeir, a village boy, lives outside the walls with the invading army - and their paths cross. 500 years later, Zeno, rehearses the play of Aethon’s story with 5 children, unknowingly in a library where a teen planted a bomb. Konstance, a girl locked in a vault on an interstellar ship in the future, is alone copying scraps of Aethon’s story told by her father.

I struggled to describe the book, which is how I felt reading it. There was just too much going on to keep track of and truly enjoy.

Thank you to Netgalley and Scribner for my Advanced Reader Copy.

Surprisingly, I've never read All the Light We Cannot See. My students, though, love it and check it out regularly. This is my first book by Doerr, but I will certainly be going back and reading more. This, to me, was very reminiscent of David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas or the Bone Clocks) which is absolutely my cup of tea. Great book.

Look, I have a soft spot for books about books. This is a long and unusual book, but it carries at its heart a love for libraries and reading that feels unbound from time and space and threaded instead through pure emotion. It’s worth the read to experience the joy of storytelling across an eclectic backdrop of libraries and nearly surreal settings.

I loved All the Light We Cannot See. Like I LOVED it. This book, however, has too many plot lines, timelines, characters, and sudden stops for me to fully commit to 700 pages. I wish I loved it; I wish I could follow it. I wish for a lot that this book just didn't deliver.

Thank you to Scribner and Netgalley for an ARC of this novel in return for my honest review.

If I'm being honest I went into this book believing that I would not like it. That it would be a trudge. An ancient story weaving in and out of 3 other stories seemingly unrelated and centuries apart. Cloud Cuckoo Land??!! 640 pages!!

Turns out I was wrong! I flew through these 600+ pages and enjoyed all the storylines (and there are many). I was pleasantly surprised how some of the stories ended and just enjoyed the ride with all of them.

If you are looking for an escape Cloud Cuckoo Land is it!!

I just learned my lesson about requesting an ARC on author alone. I really wanted to love this book, after devouring All The Light We Cannot See. I would up abandoning this one fairly early on. It is a mish-mash of many story lines and time lines (5? I am not even sure) that did nothing but confuse me and make me cuckoo. Thank you to NetGalley and Scribner for an early digital copy in exchange for my honest opinion. Cloud Cuckoo Land is available on 9/28/2021.

Complex and Long Ambitious Work: Brilliant Narrative, A Long Read

Many of us dream about utopia, a heaven or paradise. It is an ideal place, a fantasy, actually. This very long book is telling us about the search for humanity and kindness, people and benevolence. The setting for the novel is in three separate times: Present day Idaho, 15th century Constantinople and lastly on a spaceship traveling into the future to a new planet. The one bond they all have is a story about Cloud Cuckoo Land. This story transverses the narrative albeit in different time lines.

Doerr masters his characters’ place in history and crafts their stories with nuance and detail. We are artistically introduced to Anna and Maria in 1450 in the city of Constantinople. Present day is about Zeno, Seymour and a library. And the future, Konstance, who is traveling on a spaceship, anxious to learn with the help of an AI, named Sybil.

It is a long book, carefully developed, sometimes too wordy for me. Like many philosophies, utopia aka Cloud Cuckoo Land is not perfect.


My gratitude to Simon and Schuster for this pre-published book. All opinions expressed are my own.

“Each of these books, child, is a door, a gateway to another place and time. You have your whole life in front of you, and for all of it, you’ll have this. It will be enough, don’t you think?”

I admit to being hesitant to read Anthony Doerr’s latest book, Cloud Cuckoo Land I didn’t love All the Light We Cannot See (although maybe that’s because I read it all while I was on jury duty) but I tend to love stories told from different pov that all end up meaning something when looked at together.

This book is so incredibly ambitious. The descriptions are luscious and immersive and even though the chapters are short and the book jumps around so much, I didn’t have a problem seamlessly going back and forth between characters and times.

My favorite characters kept changing. Sometimes it was Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war and now is teaching children in a play adaption of a Greek story. Sometimes I couldn’t wait for Anna, an orphan living inside the walls of Constantinople- or for Omeir, just outside those walls. Konstance, living inside a vault years and years in the future was maybe the most intriguing.

I couldn’t help but compare this book to David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, both because of the name and the way the stories all came together. I liked this book much more than I thought I would and even though I read an e-copy, I actually think an audio version of this would be beautiful.

I did have some issues with the character of Seymour and will be curious to see how others view how he was portrayed. His chapters were by far my least favorite and I wasn’t sure about some of the choices the author made around his character.

Fans of Mitchell and stories and Greek comedy will love this ambitious and at times both challenging and lovely novel. I’m choosing to view this book as a love letter to stories and libraries and that through the stories we tell, we can be immortal.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Scribner for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Epic, skillfully told tale through multiple generations that were each a genuine story in and of themselves. But, putting them together was brilliant and a gorgeous piece of work! Utterly Unique!
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for a fair and honest review.

1.5 stars rounded to 2.

All the Light We Cannot See is one of my favorite historical fiction books I have read, so I was so excited to read Cloud Cuckoo Land this autumn. I have to say that I was kind of disappointed. The writing was just as beautiful but I find that there was no plot anywhere to be seen. The book as a whole was a little bit of a mess for me. Jumping stories and timelines it all just felt difficult to keep track of things. I almost put the book down 2 or 3 times which was very sad for me. A few of the storylines didn't interest me at all because it seemed like a bunch of waiting. I also found a problem in making the "villain" character autistic, basically making the person who is different bad which made me really uncomfortable. While he has a redemption story was making him autistic really necessary?

I found that I had some focus issues while reading this like I really had to force myself to read at times. Just a disappointment all around for me.

Thank you, Scribner and NetGalley for an eARC in exchange for an honest review,

The framework of Doerr's newest opus is a newly discovered work by Diogenes, a story called "Cloud Cuckoo Land." The account shows Aethon's transformations as he seeks utopia but encounters struggle after struggle. 

The setup alternates from a siege in 1450s Constantinople, a tense scene in present-day Idaho, and a futuristic ship bound for a new land. Each learns of Aethon's story, and their journeys mirror stories of perseverance, even when discouraged or hopeless, as they find purpose and reason and connection through language, through stories, through books. This is a beautiful epic that doesn't turn away from legitimate concerns like climate change, war, identity, and acceptance, but even in these realistic treatments, offers hope, a way forward.

Doerr dedicates this work to the librarians across time, and Cloud Cuckoo Land is a fitting tribute to the role librarians play in societies. The interconnected stories represent the ties we have to each other, even if they can be tenuous and lost in a moment. But there is hope that, things thought lost forever, might just be hidden for a time.

Doerr asks us to reflect on what it is that binds us, what motivates us. How we can be contributing to the problem, but that we also are necessary, a part of the solution. How a timeless tale continues to deliver purpose and insight and offers new relevance.

This scope was dazzling. An author takes a risk at portraying such diverse characters in varied times and places, as the true test is where readers find their allegiances, whether they are unmoved by characters that feel like diversions taking away from the true storyline. I was highly invested in each character, so while I mourned the pause in one's storyline, once I turned the page I also delighted in getting to pick up the threads of another as Doerr cast a vision for what we each seek and long for.

(I received a digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.)

This new novel is my introduction to Doerr. After completing it, I am definitely inspired to go back and read his last novel, which won the Pulitzer. The book is long but it moves fast; the novel is certainly well paced and plotted. I'm not a fan of plot summaries, as a reader I like to be completely surprised, but I will just say that this is a fun, entertaining read. Doerr clearly loves books, libraries and readers and wants them to last forever. I do too. Doerr also, hpwever, seems to harbor other ambitions, and this is where the book fails. Doerr is often a c!iched, repetitive stylist though he does occasionally strike you with some lovely prose. For a good, critical review I highly recommend James Wood's review in the New Yorker; he rarely reviews popular fiction, and he doesn't quite "get" popular fiction, but still a good perspective on some of the flaws of an otherwise fun, solid novel.

I enjoyed reading this book so much! Cloud Cuckoo Land is a mix of Historical Fiction (the siege of Constantinople, Science Fiction (a group of people on a spaceship) and Fantasy (an ancient Greek comedy) that binds a nearly current timeline with the past and the future. It's a big book (640 pages) but switching between the different timelines kept it moving for me. The characters are fully formed and memorable. The author was able to bring everything together in a very satisfying way. I've just never read anything like it before!

I was a huge fan of All the Light We Cannot See and was very excited to read the author's newest book. It did not disappoint! I gave it 5 stars and recommend it highly. Thank you to #Scribner and #NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy to review.

Honestly, I requested this book because I absolutely adored All the Light We Cannot See, and I wanted to see how Doerr's next novel stacked up and I was not disappointed.

Cloud Cuckoo Land takes place in the past, the present, and the future, and I found myself intrigued by each storyline (though, if I'm honest, the timeline in the future was my favorite). There were multiple viewpoints, and the story does jump around a bit so you aren't stuck in one timelime for too long. Sometimes I enjoyed this, but other times I was wanting one timeline to continue because I was so invested in what was going to happen. Also, I found that each timeline and place was clearly written, so I was never confused as to who was speaking or what place/time the story was in.

The writing is descriptive and really allows for the reader to be transported to each part of the story. It is a long story, but it all comes together in the end.

Thank you to NetGalley, Scribner, and the author for an ARC of this book. All opinions are my own.

4.5 Stars

Thanks #NetGalley @ScribnerBooks for a complimentary eARC of #CloudCuckooLand upon my request. All opinions are my own.

Favorite Quote: “A text…a book…is a resting place for the memories of people who have lived before. A way for the memory to stay fixed after the soul has traveled on.”

Cloud Cuckoo Land is four stories in one. The stories involve three different time periods and genres and one myth (a story within the stories).

One story is set in the 1400s in Constantinople. There are two main characters. One is a poor thirteen-year-old orphan girl who lives and works with other women who embroider the robes of priests. Anna is curious and exhibits an insatiable desire to learn to read. She discovers the ancient manuscript of the story of Aethon who wants to be turned into a bird. The other main character is Omeir, a village boy who lives outside the walls of Constantinople. He has a cleft palate and is an oxen whisperer. One day he is forced to join an invading army and sets out with the soldiers toward Constantinople. His path will cross with Anna’s.

Another story is set five hundred years later in a library in Idaho. In this contemporary story, Zeno is eighty something and volunteers at the library and right now he’s helping children rehearse for a play adaptation of the ancient story of Aethon. He will cross paths with a troubled teenager, Seymour, who has planted a bomb in the library shelves as a statement about the environment and the endangerment of Owls.

The third story is set in the future and is about young Konstance who is on a spaceship called the Aros. Her favorite story is one her father has told and retold about Atheon.

The fourth story is a myth about Aethon and his fascination with the city in the clouds and his quest to be turned into a bird.

The @PulitzerPrizes author of Cloud Cuckoo Land hops between the stories and time periods with great finesse and frequency.

My advice is take notes while reading! Once you are acclimated, the individual stories are engaging and distinct from one another.

The writing is beautiful and filled with vivid details and powerful imagery and is masterful in its structure and themes. Every sentence is expertly crafted. At 637 pages, Cloud Cuckoo Land is engaging, thoughtfully written, easily read, and yet ambitious. Readers need to be prepared for a great deal of hopping around between story lines, characters, and time periods. This is the challenging and ambitious aspect of the read. But trust the author and you will find your reading rhythm. Although there is a strong theme of hope, the stories are tinged with sadness, tragedy, and despair. Readers who love a twist will be pleased with one of the stories. I have no doubt that this book will will be nominated for major awards. It’s brilliant from a writer’s point of view, and I especially loved the personification. I need to note that if you loved All the Light We Cannot See, this book is significantly different.

Two of the three stories have satisfactory conclusions. I wish the third story of Konstance on the spaceship had a more satisfactory ending. I read it twice and was left hoping for more. Although it was a good story, it was more open-ended than the others and I have questions.

There are themes that connect all the content: love of stories/books/libraries/storytelling, the importance of libraries, preservation of knowledge and thought, writing in the past that affects the future, and the importance of HOPE. In addition, each individual story has its own thoughtful themes. The author packs many substantial themes into these stories as well as some significant symbolism. At times I felt like I should be reading it as part of a class or at least with the benefit of a set of SparkNotes to aide my comprehension. I fear some of it went over my head.

I’m highly recommending Cloud Cuckoo Land for readers who like a challenging and ambitious read, for fans of Anthony Doerr (All the Light We Cannot See), and for book clubs whose readers might enjoy reading this from a literary perspective.

Content Considerations: tragedy, poverty, physical deformity, death of a sister, bomb violence

TL:DR: Interesting book, not my favorite ever, but not bad, from an author I have liked before but felt this one wasn't quite on the same level of character development. 3.5 stars rounded up.

Doerr weaves together the stories of five main characters in this interesting, yet a bit hard to get into, novel. I would say I really didn't "like" it until about halfway through, and then I kept reading to find out exactly how all the stories came together.

Best part about this book is the semi-sci-fi aspect because I enjoyed the creativity of the author. The characters were not as well-developed (aka, I didn't really care about them) as in "All the Light..."

The writing was excellent in some place, but honestly the run-on sentences got to be just too much sometimes. I understand that description and streams of thought are necessary, but it made it hard for me to concentrate at times. I consider myself generally a literary reader, too.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of this book. I am a reviewer for NetGalley.