Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

Read by Marin Ireland and Simon Jones

14 hours 52 minutes

Published September 2021 by Scribner

Publisher's Summary: 

Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.

Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.

My Thoughts: 

Definition of cloud-cuckoo-land : a realm of fantasy or of whimsical or foolish behavior

Man, are reader reviews all over the place on this one. One reviewer called it "an original idea maybe - but one big conceit." Another said it's "academic snobbery." Another said it was "hours wasted I'll never get back." But then there are those who called it a "rare and beautiful experience,"weird but awesome," and "a heart wrenching journey." So what's a reader to do when faced with those vastly different opinions about a book? 

Read the reviews. All of them. They almost all have valid points, things to be taken into consideration before you devote this much time to a book. It is a bit of a conceit to think that you can pull off a book that has this many different time lines, this many characters that deserve full attention, and tie them all to an imaginary ancient story written by actual Greek Antonius Diogenes. It is weird. It can also be jarring as it bounces from storyline to storyline; even, even though the readers are fantastic, it might be easier to keep up with in print than audio. 

But, for me at least, it was also awesome, original, and heart wrenching. Every one of the storylines tied into that ancient Greek story, Cloud Cuckoo Land and every one of them tied into one another through that text. Every one of the main characters is an outsider whose on journey is helped along by the ancient tale. It's a recognition of those who have treasured and saved written stories over the centuries and a recognition of what those stories can do for us. Doerr's characters are well developed, his settings incredibly vivid, and his command of storytelling is so impressive. 

If you loved All The Light You Cannot See, you'll recognize all of those elements from that book. But this one is definitely an entirely different kind of book, even as much as readers might like to see Doerr return to that kind of story telling. Don't look for that in this book and you will not be disappointed. This book defies categorization - it is at once science fiction, historical fiction, and fantasy. Doerr its on so many themes that will keep readers thinking about the book long after they have finished reading it. This book is a once a realm of fantasy and a book solidly set in reality.