Oct 10

Oct 10 Cloud Cuckoo Land

Author: Anthony Doerr
Publisher: Scribner
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

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.

TL;DR Review

Cloud Cuckoo Land was a fun-to-read, moving book, but it was definitely not perfect. I liked it, but certain aspects left me a little uncomfortable.

For you if: Like stories with multiple timelines, and/or literary fiction with more emphasis on plot.

Full Review

Cloud Cuckoo Land was one of the most highly anticipated books of the fall, if not the year, and it’s a finalist for the 2021 National Book Award. I really enjoyed reading it, but when I finished, I couldn’t quite bring myself to say I loved it.

First, the good: The plot — three distinct timelines tied together by a single story, emphasizing the timelessness of our stories and the importance of unearthing, preserving, and enhancing them — was a lot of fun to read. Parts of the present-day timeline read nearly like a thriller, which definitely makes the book a page turner. You’ll fly through its nearly 600 pages. It was also emotional and, in places, deeply empathetic.

Then the not-so-good: First, for a book with central themes *about* climate change, its environmentalism felt surface-level at best, a cheap grab for a plot device at worst. It didn’t really say anything new or present any useful ideas about our current reality or where we go from here.

And second — and this is where I’m sort of conflicted — one of the main characters is neurodivergent (possibly ASD, at least sensory processing disorder), but his character arc is uncomfortable. He’s manipulated into radical ecoterrorism. On the one hand, I actually thought from an individual character perspective, it was well done. Your heart really breaks for Seymour at every turn, and it’s easy to see exactly how and why this happened to him. But on the other hand, we still live in a world where neurodivergent representation isn’t mainstream enough to be able to show someone easily manipulated into violence without the danger of feeding problematic stereotypes. I think ultimately I’m less than comfortable with the choice, but I also really did love Seymour. It’s just hard to expect the world to read him as an individual instead of as part of a larger narrative about neurodivergence, violence, and the world we live in.

Ultimately, I’m glad I read it, and like I said, it was a really fun, entertaining read. But it’s far from perfect.