Cover Image: Cloud Cuckoo Land

Cloud Cuckoo Land

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Member Reviews

As soon as I saw Anthony Doerr was writing a new book, I knew I HAD to have it. "Cloud Cuckoo Land" broke away from everything I expected. The entire time I read it, I was a cloud of sadness and hopefulness and depression and thrill. With such an unusual book, it's hard to describe it in terms of other things I've read, but to me it gave off distinctive "The Giver" feels - memories, flashbacks, that unusual taste of "what if." Definitely left me wanting more.

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This book is a book lovers dream come true! I absolutely loved it! It was such a descriptive and captivating read. Highly recommend! 5 stars!!

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3.5*
Doerr is a gifted writer but here he is almost too ambitious in his attempt to impress. The novel starts off in a confusing manner but does get much easier to follow. There are multiple timelines centering on an ancient classic text Cloud Cuckoo Land written by Diogenes. This mythic tale tells of a shepherd who wishes for his life to change resulting in him turning into a bird and a donkey.

In 1453 we find young Anna who lives in the walled city of Constantinople. She lives under the care of nuns who are very strict. Anna wants to learn how to read and convinces a scribe to teach her. As she searches the rubble, she unearths Diogenes’ text. The city is under siege and among those assailing the city is Omeir, a young boy with a disfiguring cleft lip. He is a kindly soul who has been persecuted for his appearance and forced to join the advancing army because his strong oxen are needed.

The Idaho story is set in 2020 and centers around Seymour, a young man who has become ensnared by a violent environmental group who urge him to make a statement that will get a lot of attention. He’s been raised by his single mother who barely makes ends meet. It’s clear that he has some kind of condition like autism or Asberger’s. Easily swayed, he ends up making poor choices and finds himself in trouble while a group of children are rehearsing a play of Cloud Cuckoo Land in a room above him. Zeno is also part of this timeline but he is old now and has learned a lot since his 1940’s internment in a Korean POW camp. He has translated parts of Diogenes’ book from Greek to English and is the author of the play the children are rehearsing, just as Seymour is creating chaos in the library below.

The third setting is in the future where a young girl is on a spaceship that has left a dying planet. She is with her parents but later finds they may not be able to protect her from growing threats on the ship. In the library she comes across Diogenes’ shapeshifting story. She becomes increasingly isolated and questions the artificial intelligence that controls the ship and everything she does.

So many of the characters have flaws yet they are sympathetic and unique. Each has a connection to a library, a place of learning and literature. All of them find Diogenes’ classic manuscript of longing for paradise. The plot centers around a philosophical desire to be better, make things better or find a better world, just as in the mythic tale. It reminds us of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz as she seeks a safer place for her and Toto.

There is a lot to like about the underlying theme, but the elements are woven together in a somewhat confusing manner. It is worth the read, despite the beginning and the complex connections. Clearly, Doerr is a skilled author who takes his craft seriously and brings his readers on a mythic journey, just like the original classic Greek Argonauts.

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The most exquisitely written novel I have read in quite some time. Doerr defies all rules in crafting this wonderfully woven masterpiece. Those that invest the time in reading this novel will be rewarded with such creativity that they will be at a loss for words.

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Interesting book. Starts slow for me, but the writing itself pulled me in and kept me reading. Descriptive and interesting.

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This is a story about stories. Characters and plots were elegantly woven together. Although it spans thousands of years, it’s also wet modern. Thoughtfully crafted, but accessible to the reader.. The characters are vivid, rich, and come to life.

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Cloud Cuckoo Land weaves together multiple stories across time and space through the tale of an ancient text. In the first half of the book, we meet and begin to learn the stories of the large cast of characters. As I did, I sense some people will connect more to certain stories than others, which made it difficult to keep track of all of the characters and the nuances of their stories. While the story came together beautifully in the end, I wasn't invested enough in the first half of the story to appreciate all of the details and the payoff in the end. I would recommend this book to readers of fantasy and historical fiction, but if you're picking it up just because you loved All the Light We Cannot See, it may not be for you.

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A great book! I highly recommend and I look forward to reading anything this author writes! I loved the character development. I really felt like I was there and part of the story. I didn't want it to end!

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This was a very well done and well rounded novel. I really enjoyed the characters and the development of the plot throughout.

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While the writing itself was stunning, the storyline was really sprawling and I found it hard to stay focused and invested in the book overall. Some stories were more intriguing than others, so I zoned in and out while reading it.

I listened to this one on audio while I read, and I found it harder to focus on the audio aspects.

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I'l always be intrigued to read anything by this author so I'm glad I read this. It was good if not good enough to ever reread.

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Anthony Doerr has, like many of us, clearly been doing some heavy thinking about the end of the world. But instead of binge-watching Ted Lasso or power-snacking, Doerr has written Cloud Cuckoo Land, a massive, extraordinary book about five characters trying to find a reason to live when facing extinction.

In 1453, a 14-year-old orphan named Anna is caught in the Siege of Constantinopole, while on the other side of the city’s walls, a young oxherd named Omeir is stuck working for the invading forces. In 2020, in a small lakeside town in Idaho, Zeno Ninis, an elderly veteran, faces the end of a life of frustrated desires, while Seymour Stuhlman, a high school student, casts himself as an avenger of the dying planet. And in the future, another 14-year-old girl named Konstance escapes the burning Earth for a planet 4.23 light years away.

Cloud Cuckoo Land

All of these characters are united through the centuries by a story—Cloud Cuckoo Land, a fable written by Antonius Diogenes in ancient Greece about a shepherd who stumbles upon a play and, mistaking the city of the gods on stage for a real place, sets out to find it and live there. (In actuality, Doerr invented the story, taking elements from Aristophanes and from Apuleius’ The Golden Ass.)

All of the characters have something else in common as well: they’re facing their deaths. Anna can expect, once the invaders breach the city, that they will rape or kill her. And they will—this is history, and it already happened. Omeir, born with a cleft palate, is meant to be one of the countless bodies left in the mud behind the marching army. Zeno survives a Korean War POW camp only to face a death at the hands of Seymour, who wants to detonate a pair of homemade bombs to protest climate change. Finally, Konstance discovers that she’ll die without ever seeing the world that’s supposed to be her salvation.

But the story of Aethon, the shepherd who becomes a donkey, then a fish, then a bird, manages to lift each of them from their grim circumstances, and into an imagined world. It becomes a lifeline, even as time and decay and loss threaten the story itself.

Some of Doerr’s fans from the wildly bestselling All The Light We Cannot See—and some critics—might have trouble following him on this long journey. He fills it with with detours and tangents, and includes big chunks of his invented Greek fable, as well as a spaceship, which tends to throw some readers.

Doerr still manages to make it all look easy. It would rob the reader of some of the joys of the book to say too much about how all these disparate threads come together, but the novel reads like it’s half its actual length. Doerr has packed it dense with what are clearly hours and hours of deep research—the chapter on the building of the biggest cannon in the ancient world is just one example–and yet it flies.

It helps that Doerr’s prose is extraordinarily clear and clean. He effortlessly mimics a half-dozen different voices, ranging across junior-high English assignments, academic jargon, and YouTube videos, while his narration occasionally drops in a devastating aside or beautiful piece of description.

Like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, to which people are already comparing it, Cloud Cuckoo Land is a blend of invention and history, science fiction and fable, romance and war story. But in contrast to Mitchell’s sometimes cold and cerebral detachment, Doerr’s novel hums with sympathy for all his characters, even the most unpleasant one.

Seymour, in the hands of another author, could easily be a cliché, a Trenchcoat Mafia wannabe who a steady diet of shady Internet videos has radicalized. He brings two pressure-cooker bombs to a library where a group of 10-year-olds are rehearsing a play based on the old Greek story, which Zeno has spent years translating. While he doesn’t exactly mean to explode a bunch of kids and an old man, he’s clearly willing to accept some collateral damage in defense of Mother Earth.

But Doerr also shows Seymour as a child who a single mom in a trailer is raising. Overwhelmed by an undiagnosed sensory disorder, struggling with school, he finds peace only in a quiet wood near his home. Bombarded by the constant bad news about the state of the planet and choking every day on smoke from the burning forests surrounding his town, Seymour decides that he needs to make a statement. He believes the world is ending, and that justifies almost anything: “By age seventeen he’d convinced himself that every human he saw was a parasite, captive to the dictates of consumption.”

But the world is always ending. Anna, in Constantinopole, is witness to the destruction of the last vestiges of the Roman Empire. She collects moldy scraps of old books and scrolls to sell to visiting scholars, who are picking the bones of the city clean. Constantinopole has no chance against the Sultan’s enormous cannon, made specifically to take down the city’s walls.

“The ark has hit the rocks, child,” one scholar says to Anna. “And the tide is washing in.”

Konstance, centuries later, is also living in what is supposed to be an ark, a spaceship that will carry her and eighty-two others to a distant planet now that the Earth is burned and barren. But time and circumstance threaten even this ark: no one living with Konstance will live long enough to make it to their new home. That’s for their great-grandchildren. And just outside the metal skin of their ship is a vast, howling black void of indifference.

As metaphors go, this one is pretty easy to interpret. We all know how every story ends. The walls of even the greatest city in the world will fall. The greatest books of all time will crumble to dust. Eventually, everyone we know and love will die, and so will we. This is not what most of us would call a happily ever after.

Doerr has been grappling with the idea of extinction at least since he wrote an essay titled “Planet Zoo” about the destruction in our path due to the changes we’ve created in our climate, and our inability to swerve from it.

Like us, Anna, Konstance, and the other characters have to find a way to live with impending doom bearing down on them. They discover a story that animates them. It gives their lives meaning, or represents a puzzle to be solved, or simply provides comfort to the dying.

Doerr knows sometimes the stories we latch onto turn ugly and violent, like Seymour’s does. The search for a golden city filled with riches is the driving impulse of Diogenes’ fable, but it’s also what sets the men in the Sultan’s army marching. “On one side is dancing, and the other is death. Page after page after page,” is how Zeno puts it in his translation of Diogenes.

But as long as the story lasts, we “slip the trap,” Doerr writes. We escape. We forget about death and hunger and illness, and the story transports somewhere else.

And the story itself can last for lifetimes beyond ours. Omeir passes the fable down to his children. They listen as Aethon blunders from one misadventure to another, struggling to find the perfect city in the sky, seeking Heaven but turning himself into an ass. “Tell us,” Omeir’s son says, “what the fool does next.”

This is how we survive: by finding the stories that will survive us. If Doerr’s book has a moral, that’s it.

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This book requires a good deal of time to savor each storyline. It is time well worth spending. The characters and events are memorable. I recommend this book to readers who don't mind a challenging read. It takes some time to work your way through all the wonderful details in the storylines of each of the main characters.

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I just couldn't get into this one. I absolutely love Anthony Doerr's earlier book, but this one was meh . . . just had too many points of view, too many characters and not enough action. I was a bit bored.

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I found this book to be a challenging read. The author has an intriguing vision, but the varied characters made it hard to keep track of the story line. I wanted to like this book much more than I did.

I received a copy of this book from Net Galley in exchange for my unbiased review.

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To start it’s difficult to fathom the amount of time Doerr spent with this book. It is intricate with its connections however it reads quickly. So well written this book takes you from Constantinople to far into the future, with all the characters connected by an Ancient Greek text: Cloud Cuckoo Land.

At its heart it’s a love letter to librarians and the power of literacy while also telling three different compelling plots. I could not put this book down and loved so many of the characters.

I read this with my IRL book club and it led to some great discussions on literacy and what we are choosing to leave behind for our descendants.

This is a great discussable book that is truly a must read for all book lovers.

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My heart skipped a beat today when I found this copy of CLOUD CUCKOO LAND on my porch, thank you immensely @scribnerbooks. This is it! My favorite book of the year, I’m almost positive. 5⭐️. Currently sitting on my floating shelf of forever favorite books. Gosh, I’ll always think of this book and remember our family trip to Delaware, my kids little and leaving sand everywhere, sand lost in the pages of my ARC (which I’ll save, of course). Pages turned while the water rushed around my feet. I brought eight books on that trip and I only read CCL. All of that to say:
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I loved this story Doerr wrote…the myth of Cloud Cuckoo Land, the characters we meet across time who are lost and all finding themselves drawn to an ancient text, who are looking for home. Who are looking for a place to belong. Home! The crucial part of the story, for me. The point of everything, I suppose. You can have the whole world, but yet. Home is what matters.
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Did you love All The Light We Cannot See? Me too. But this isn’t that book. And yet! The importance of human connections, I can see it in both stories. As well as Doerr’s unforgettable storytelling style. It pulled me in from the first few pages so much that I was reading in the car just to keep going.

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This book was soooo amazing! At first I wasn’t sure about it as it jumps around to different characters in totally different times and places and it was hard to keep track of. But once I began to get all of that organized in my mind, I couldn’t put the book down. I loved all the different stories, wondering if or how they could ever possibly intertwine, but enjoying each for the wonderful stories they were, even independent of each other. The language and writing were so beautiful and I found many things to highlight and ponder upon. I so highly recommend this book! 5 glowing stars!!!

Thanks to Netgalley for my advance copy of this book. All opinions expressed here are my own.

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I will be honest, I still have not gotten around to reading “All the Light We Cannot See” so I wasn’t sure what I was getting into with this one. It seems to be similar, with several storylines not quite converging but revolving around a theme or subject. In this case, that thing is the story “Cloud Cuckoo Land”. There are several storylines, including a teenage girl several generations in the future, an elderly man and a teenager in present day, and in 15th century Constantinople, a girl named Anna and a boy named Omeir, living different lives but dealing with the same war.

I loved the writing, so I will definitely have to check out his other works. I did enjoy this book, however, I found myself more interested in some of the storylines than others. I wished there was an entire book that followed Konstance’s storyline. I think that would have been really interesting. All in all, I liked this book a lot!

I was given an advanced reader's copy via NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own

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Such a beautiful, unusual multi-timeline story involving various characters loosely connected by an invented ancient tome. I loved the exploration of different time periods and the insight into the daily lives of the different characters. This novel is vastly different than All The Light We Cannot See, but written with just as much accurate historical detail and interesting characters. Highly recommended!

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