I was not able to download the book correctly and therefore could not read it. I was really looking forward to reading the book. It was very frustrating trying to get the book to download to my Kindle

"Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you”

Read this book when you have the time to lose yourself for hours/days at a time because once you begin, you won’t want to stop. Five stars isn’t nearly enough for this ambitious, heartbreaking, beautifully written tale that at it’s heart is an homage to books and reading, but which touches on so many big themes in its wild ride back and forth from 1400’s Constantinople, to present-day Idaho and out into space where a group of earthlings hope to find a new planet to inhabit. The characters are real and well-drawn, the movement from the past to the future and back to the present feels seamless, the connections between the segments are slowly revealed, and the prose is beautifully poetic. This is a book that will win prizes, and spark deep discussions - it is about connection and hope, longings, and one’s search for a life that is both authentic and rewarding. This is a story that will stay with you for a long time after the last page is turned.

I am not going to give a synopsis of this novel, I would refer you to the publishers description. I can say that this story moves through time, place and person in a curious way. At first I wasn't sure what was going on, but the story draws you in and actually makes you think.
This is a wonderful book. It is a book of wonder. It is captivating and even educating. I loved it. That is all I can say.
I now feel moved to find out more about living in "cloud cuckoo land" and about ancient Greek playwrights. Prior to this book, they were never on my radar.
Enjoy!

Thank you NetGalley and Scribner for the early read.

I read and reviewed a physical copy of this, and wanted to leave a review here as well.

Wow. I knew going into this that I loved Dorr's work, but I was absolutely blown away. This takes everything readers of ALL THE LIGHT WE CANNOT SEE have come to know and love and mixes it with myth, magic and space. Doerr has such, SUCH a great way of writing believable characters and the way he details their relationship to the world around them is some of the best I've honestly ever seen. At first glance, this story doesn't sound like it would live up to the hype of his bestselling novel, but it does everything that novel does and then some. I fell in love with these characters, the myths, the mystery... and I cannot wait to see what Doerr has in store for us next.

Pick this up, immediately,

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

The novel stretches from 15th Century Constantinople and Bulgaria to the middle of the 22nd Century in Qaanaaq, Greenland. What ties it all together? A single Greek manuscript describing the journey of Aethon, who “lived 80 Years a Man, 1 Year a Donkey, 1 Year a Sea Bass, 1 Year a Crow.” (And, yes, I have instructed my children to use that in my obituary.)

The main characters are Anna, Omeir, Zeno, Seymour, and Konstance ... all dreamers and survivors. Each person, with their own motivations, does everything in their power to keep the story from extinction.

This is not light reading. It is 640 pages, and the ties between the characters ... and the manuscript and its tale ... are developed with care and detail. Even so, I never felt that the novel was plodding.

The book’s dedication is
For the librarian, then, now, and in the years to come.
This is so appropriate because at every turn we can see how a story can just disappear forever.

Even though very much different than All the Light We Cannot See, the characters and their stories are just as marvelous.


Thanks to Scribner Books and Net Galley for the eARC.

Doerr’s 2021 release of “Cloud Cuckoo Land” is a 640-page epic poem to literature and history. Spanning centuries in scope, he tells his tale through five separate narratives, two from the fall of Constantinople in 1453, two from the Twentieth Century, and one from the future as we journey to other worlds. All five narratives are connected by their work transcribing and translating an Ancient Greek myth filled with Magic and adventures. As you read this epic, you will be whisked back and forth between these stories and eventually shown their connections.

Each story is fascinating on its own. Be it Anna’s story as a powerless seamstress locked in the walls of the greatest city on Earth, knowing that the few soldiers left on it were scarcely sufficient to hold off the Sultan’s endless armies or his new siege engine and massive cannons. Outside the walls we hear the story of a young farm boy, Omeir, with a fearsome cleft who is shunned by all, later joining the great armies of the conquering force. In the Twentieth century we get the story of an odd young orphaned man, Zeno, who enlists in the Army to follow his father’s path to heroism, but spends the war in Korea in a POW camp, tortured and abused, and having his loyalty questioned upon return. Seymour is born to a single mother who is ill-equipped to deal with his autistic issues and scarcely knows what to do with his later environmental politics that he deals with Edward Abbey and the Monkey Wrench style. Finally, we get Konstance with a K, who is aboard a ship that will take generations, we are told, to reach its destination in the Stars.

Each narrative is touching and heartfelt and Doerr draws them all together with an Ancient Greek fantasy about a utopian paradise.

Enjoy the narratives for themselves, but the story as a whole never draws itself to an epic conclusion. And that’s the issue because, after this huge buildup, what you are really left with is basically the idea that we are all connected through history from our past, to the present, to the future. And, by the end of this volume, you kind of just wanted a little bit more.

I don't know how Anthony Doerr does it. He can take the most disparate elements and weave them into a fictional love song. In this case I feel like it is a love song to a book, to how story can inspire us and save us by reaching across time and space.
There are three tales in this book, not counting the Greek play that keeps popping up. Each is set in a different time and place. In the 15th Century we join Anna and Omeir at the siege of Constantinople. Anna is inside the city walls, Omeir is outside. In the present time a library is under siege as Zeno, an eighty year old, is directing children in an old Greek play. In the future Konstance, a child on an interstellar space craft, sits in quarantine reconstructing a tale her father told her.
Each story is real and gripping and somehow they all make sense together.
(This is a review of an ARC.)

Writing: 5/5 Plot: 4.5/5 Characters: 4/5 Drama/depression index: high!

Greek classics, a love of books and literature, and the twin pillars of human suffering and hope pervade this broad, sweeping story which spans interstellar travel, the siege of Constantinople, and eco-terrorism in an Idaho library. The published book description is actually very good, so I encourage you to read it directly rather than my trying to do an inadequate recap.

This is a beautifully written, deeply researched, cleverly interconnected story and by the end I was enjoying it a great deal. The characters are intricately done with their memories, desires, and deep need to survive, understand, and have agency in their lives. However, there is an awful lot of pathos for my taste. Before each character can succeed, there is an incredible amount of (too well) described suffering. This is not surprising — the siege of Constantinople is not a great place to be an orphaned girl with an antipathy for embroidery or a hare-lipped boy considered a demon by the greater population. But I clocked 65% through my kindle version before things stopped being utterly depressing. I did love the way literature and the classics were woven throughout, and I found the interstellar generation ship running away from a dying Earth thread quite interesting. The slowly emerging resolution of these independent threads was remarkably well done giving me an overall positive view of the book.

This is a strong and brilliantly executed book. If you loved his Pulitzer Prize winning All the Light You Cannot See, you will likely love this as well.

A little bit of fantasy, whimsy, and magic in this tale but very real at the same time. For fans of All the Lights You Cannot See, but also vastly different from that title of the same time. Writing is fantastic as it is Anthony Doerr.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr is amazing. I usually avoid superlatives in my reviews because they can sound fake but I honestly loved this book and it is hands down my favorite so far in 2021 (out of 72 books). There are five different characters / points of view and three significantly different timelines. The timelines move at different paces and cover different amounts of time and also feel like they are different genres. Libraries, librarians and books are a big part of each storyline. It really felt like reading multiple must-read-one-more-chapter page-turners at one time. And they all fit together and make sense at the end, without feeling contrived. There was one small unanswered question I was left with but actually one of the characters was left with the same so was likely intentional and it was really a minor point. I couldn’t stop reading last night until I finished but wish now I had saved some for today. Thanks to Net Galley and to Scribner for the advanced copy to read and review. This book is expected to be published at the end of September 2021.

Well, the title is right. As others have noted, this is a book covering an almost unfathomable amount of ground, both in time and in the number of POVs. I was really looking forward to the challenge, having heard such good things about this author. But this book was impenetrable to me. Perhaps it is the season - it’s summer here in New England and there are many things competing for attention. It was just too much mental effort to keep track of what was going on and it felt like I was learning to juggle just to enter the story, only to have a new ball tossed in to manage every few pages. Too much all around, without the usual pleasure of being immersed in a story. That said, I will try it again this winter and see if it’s more suited to a quieter time of year.

Thanks to NetGalley for providing a copy of this book.

Thank you to Scribner Books and Net Galley for the eARC of Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antony Doerr.

Cloud Cuckoo Land is a novel about an ancient text; the story of Aethon, and how it connects five different people together. You will meet characters from 1453 on into the future: Omeir, Anna, Zeno, Seymour, and Konstance. While reading the novel, you will have no idea how the story of Aethon connects the stories of these five people but in the climax of the story, the author weaves the character's and their stories together in a very precise way with a powerful message for all of us. I don't want to give spoilers because you would have no reason to read it. Let's just say that the message is one of hope, love, books, and our planet. With so many POV's and multiple timelines, I often found myself perplexed and muddled. The writing is beautiful but there is a lot of it!!!!! I believe this just may be the author's writing style. Many readers will find this mesmerizing but for me it was just too much. This is a long read and one that you can't binge. Overall, I enjoyed this read. It's a book that I know many will love!

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Cloud Cuckoo Land
By Anthony Doerr

First: What this book is not – it is not a "beach read", nor a fast paced high adventure. It is not a whodunit.

What it is: A long, exquisitely written, slow building story. But again, that is not the entirety of it. It contains many stories, taking place over vast distances in time and place. Mr. Doerr presents to the reader a variety of characters, who initially appear to be unconnected, and yet, as you make your way through the chapters, the connections unfold like the petals of a flower until the whole becomes known.

The stories take place in the distant past, in the present, and in the distant (or maybe not so distant) future. There are common themes: human belief that the world and all living things are on earth for man's benefit; that we are blindly destroying our world; that the human mind is not ever satisfied, always striving for something different than what we have.

I very much enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it to any reader looking for a book that will stay with you long after you finish it.

Revolving around an ancient myth, Anthony Doerr’s characters like Aethon, the mythical hero, are on a search for knowledge. Zeno, war veteran, retired snowplow driver and translator of Ancient Greek, becomes a public hero. Seymour, sensitive lover of the environment and different from his peers, turns destructive in his quest. Omeir, shunned by the world because of his handicap, becomes gentle and protective. Anna, alone, fleeing from a city under destruction, becomes the guardian of the ancient myth while Konstance, another solitary female who travels through space, having heard about Aethon through her father, seeks answers in the myth. Two characters from the past, two from the present and one from the future proceed through the work, bound to the myth and sharing the tenacity of the hero, often encountering an owl motif. At first these diverse threads demand a commitment from the reader;. As the novel progresses, the threads merge and the theme becomes clear. Like the myth “what seems complicated at first” is “actually quite simple.” Staying true to their quests, the characters are rewarded; so too is the reader.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to read an ARC of Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. This is my honest feedback.

As most readers in the world, I loved All The Light We Cannot See which won so many major prizes. I was delighted to be able to preview Mr. Doerr's latest book. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a huge undertaking that encompasses many lands, many years, many different people. It is unclear where the story is going for quite a while as it jumps from the 15oos to the present to the future. The only link between the times being books and librarians. The book is dedicated to all the librarians in the world. Each part of the book is prefaced by a page of an "ancient" writing (I believe Mr. Doerr actually wrote it) that tells the story of a being who lived 80 years as a man, 1 year as a donkey, 1 year as a sea bass and 1 year as a crow.

This is a tale of wonder, of travel in lands and in space, of what is happening to our planet both to the earth and the people who live on it and in the end, as T.S Elliot says: "and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

It takes some time to get into the book but I suggest to readers to hang in there. If you love books, and once again, Doerr uses children to tell the story of our lives, and you love the honest curiosity of children, you will admire this book. It is huge in scope and leaves you with a big "Wow!"

I loved All of the Light You Cannot See and was a little nervous starting this finding out the book is set in different time periods and has alternating narrators. It took me a minute to find my groove, but I quickly did.

The story tells the story of how a book survives time. As a book lover how could I ask for more?

This is unlike anything I have read before but, I loved the magical tale.

Anthony Doerr dedicates the book to the librarians, then, now, and the years to come.

How does one describe this book - part history, part fantasy, part sci-fi, that takes place over more than a half dozen time frames from the 15th century to the 22nd century, consisting of several storylines, all connected by one story book that survives over seven centuries. I’m rating it 4.5 stars because for the first third of the book I found it difficult to stay engaged, but then the stories really picked up and I couldn’t wait to find out what happens. It’s a slow build, but if you stay with it you’ll be rewarded in the end.

Wow! This is a monster of a book. So many different people and things going on. It was a little hard to get into at first but let me tell you this book is amazing! Everything comes together at the end. Just stick with it. This is a book that you will be thinking about and wanting to talk about for a long time.

I am a fan of Anthony Doerr. His writing is beautiful and he is able to transport his readers across centuries and continents to plunge them right into the story. Cloud Cuckoo Land brings several storylines together, each one its own marvel, and woven together an absolute delight. Despite the length of this book, I did not want it to end. Simply beautiful.

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with the opportunity to read and review this book.

I LOVED this book. It’s so different from Doer’s other works and yet somehow retains his voice. I enjoyed the way he wove multiple time periods together so seamlessly to show how they impact and influence each other. The characters were so lovable.