I would like to dedicate this book review to myself (That was a little bit of book humor for those who read the book) :)

Cloud Cuckoo Land shifts between five characters: Konstance, Zeno, Seymour, Anna, and Omeir. Many years in the future, Konstance has been living in a space ship called The Argos her entire life when she faces some challenges. In present day, Zeno and Seymour are from Idaho and are grappling with life's losses. In the 1400's, we have Anna and Omeir in Constantinople who are in the midst of a battle.

My rating is largely driven off the fact that I value an interesting story above all else. This book was definitely interesting. This book was also a confusing mess especially to begin with. Cloud Cuckoo Land shifts between 5 different characters and also non-linear timelines. You might be reading about a character's middle point in life and then switch to another character's life but in a different time period and at the beginning of that character's life. Listen, I'm no stranger to multiple POV's, but usually it is limited to 3 different people max. This book has 5 different people! Then, throw on top of that shifting timelines. If I was the editor, I would have put the book in a chronological order. Often, I would feel like "Oh, this is just getting really interesting" then cut to next character. It would have been better to just stick with one character at a time in my opinion. The beginning of the book read more like a collection of short stories because it was so disjointed.

My favorite parts of the books were regarding Konstance, Zeno, and Seymour. The sections regarding Anna and Omeir didn't really have my interest, and it felt a little forced on the reader. Alright enough, Negative Nancy. This book was 600 pages, and it held my attention for the most part for the entire book. I read the physical copy of this, but I think the audiobook will really bring this to the next level. My philosophy is that despite genre if the storytelling is good, I will read it. Well, this book had good storytelling in spades.

Overall, looking forward to reading more books by this author and great storytelling (if you can get past the disjointedness).

I so wanted to love this book, just because I loved All the Light We Cannot See. However, I found the multiple storylines way too ambitious for me. It could be the place that I am in right now in my own personal life, but reading this wasn't a gift to myself or an escape from reality. I would read a few pages and put it down for a day or two. It was just plain hard work for me.

Beautifully written, but I did not really enjoy reading this very long, densely populated book.
The idea of a timeless story, which ties everyone living in different times and circumstances from approximately 1000 years in the past to 100 years is very adventurous.
The story is segmented into various points of view, some more interesting than others, and all the different segments are united in a way that is poignant and ingenious. But I still had a hard time taking it all in and comprehending it.
The stories of Zeno and Seymour seemed to be the most fleshed out to me and I loved how their stories came together. I also liked the story of the futuristic Konstance and how she carried on the ancient story of Aethon.
The different narratives reminds me of "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell, which I absolutely loved, but I somehow did not feel as involved with this book.

This book is unlike anything I've ever read - it is so many stories that span centuries, and eventually tie together in a surprisingly beautiful way. The author gives amazing attention to the different settings and characters. I truly enjoyed each storyline. What is even more impressive is that each storyline is a different genre - an ancient Greek story, a historical story in Constantinople in the 1400s, a modern story in 2020, a war story during the Korean War, and a sci-fi story in the future. As the book went on, I was more and more curious to see how the stories all fit together!

My only complaint is that sometimes the descriptions dragged on a bit too long - somewhere in the middle I lost steam and had to take a break for a few days. For the first half of the book I was trying so hard to sort the different storylines, that I think I missed the deeper meaning in the Greek story of Aethon. Eventually I hope to revisit the book and read again with more attention to the many details.

I would recommend this book to readers who love many genres, because it has a little bit of everything. Cloud Cuckoo Land is a truly beautiful book!

A beautifully written novel that is a mixture of historical fiction, science fiction and contemporary fiction. Told from three timeframes — 1453, the present and the future — this is a multi-layered and complex tale with interesting and compelling characters that involves multiple timelines and alternating narratives. Yet, somehow all basically comes together in the end. I really enjoyed this novel, but I did not love it (although I loved the author’s lush writing style). For me, this was just a bit too disjointed and had just a bit too much going on. Nonetheless, this may well go down as a great piece of literature, especially because of its beautiful prose.

This is hands down the best book I've read in 2021 so far and likely in my top 10 of all time. It is so beautifully written and we follow multiple points of view from Anna, adventurous and flawed sister, Zeno, Greek loving war prisoner turned child play director, Seymour, struggling boy in an overwhelming world, Konstance, future hunter and lover of the world of the Atlas, and Omier, proud animal brother. These brief descriptions do not reveal the depth of each of these characters. Each chapter that brought you closer to understanding them was entrancing. I could not put this book down and the way their stories, although some centuries apart intertwine was well paced and wonderfully told. I cannot recommend this book enough and encourage you to pre-order and get started the day you have it in hand.

Thank you to Net Galley, Scribner and Anthony Doerr for the advanced digital copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land. I was dying to read this book because I loved Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See. I was thrilled to get a chance to read Doerr’s most recent novel and I absolutely loved this book!! Be warned that this book is completely- and I mean completely- different from All the Light and it’s a long one (over 600 pages). But it’s creative, beautifully written, different from anything else I’ve read and hopeful and thought-provoking at the same time. There are multiple stories being told through multiple characters in different time periods, so it takes a bit to get into the flow and commune with the characters, but it’s so worth the effort!!

This book needs to be read when you have a free mind to appreciate it. As a toddler mom, first year teacher, and creative writing MFA student I was bogged down by the immensity of it and wish I had read it over the summer.

I was hoping that other readers experienced this story differently and looked at other reviews and saw a handful felt the same. That there seems to be a lot of beautiful, but lack of epiphany. The book' leaves you feeling like you missed something. At first, I thought it was because I have an overwhelmed mind at the moment, but it looks like others feel the same sort of emptiness in this book.

I'm sure a lot of people will love this book but it just wasn't for me. I couldn't get into it so I didn't finish it. Thanks for the chance to try it.

Thank you very much for the opportunity to read and review Cloud Cuckoo Land. Unfortunately, this book was not for me. I tried about 3 times to get into this, made it about 15% in and just could not connect with anyone in the story. While I appreciate what Doerr is trying to do with the three timelines it was just a bit too much for me.

Thank you again for the opportunity.

Thank you to NetGalley and the Publisher for granting me this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Where do I even begin with Cloud Cuckoo Land? It is extremely well written, complete and great story-telling. There are numerous characters, not only in different countries, but different time periods ranging from the 1400's to distant years in the future. At first, it can seem a little daunting with all of these story lines to keep up with, but the characters are easily distinguishable from one another and have such captivating stories.

Cloud Cuckoo Land will be one of those books where it seems like almost everyone has a different interpretation of what the "message" is. I believe that's part of the beauty of Cloud Cuckoo Land is that it is MEANT to be interpreted differently for different people. This is a dense, "Big Brain" book, but I say that with all of the best intentions. If you are looking for a soft, fluff book while sipping drinks on the beach, this is not it. My only criticism with the book is that I felt toward the very end it was becoming a bit long-winded and I was ready for it to wrap up a little sooner than it did.

I've already recommended this book to one friend, and will continue to do so for others!

Doerr has crafted an ambitious novel that spans centuries, marking the inside with a plethora of characters. The dedication lays out an inscription, "For the librarians, then, now, and in years to come." Beyond that Doerr also explores climate change in the book's periphery, but the main thread stays with the transformative power and impact of the written word and the stories passed down.

"Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes."

The idea from this quote that appears fairly early on in Cloud Cuckoo Land seems to be the crux of the entire book, the idea upon which the whole novel pivots — no matter the time period in which it takes place. Doerr has two characters, Anna and Omeir, whose storylines converge during the fall of Constantinople at the time of the Ottoman invasion. Another set of characters, Zeno and Seymour, have a connection that tethers the novel in present day (2019), while also developing the characters through flashbacks of both their childhoods (and adulthood with Zeno, as he is in his eighties in 2019) — and which displays one of my main contentions with the stories. Finally, Doerr's most purposeful character, Konstance, whose storyline is set in the not-too-distant future aboard Argos, a spacecraft housing vestiges of Earth: seeds, information, and people. And still smattered throughout are excerpts from a translation attempt from Zeno Ninis for Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes.

Doerr's writing is as beautiful as ever. Thinking through his various storylines individually, they felt masterfully constructed and injected with his imagination — shining with potential. But from the very beginning, this book was so packed with severely segmented, julienned stories, that I never managed to hold onto any of them. Wet vegetables, laid out like matchsticks — slippery and elusive and terrible for solid construction. And soon enough, I struggled to care.

And on top of it all, the damn thing was in present tense.

"It's never easy. Past tense literally causes him back pain, the way it flings all the verbs into the dark. Then there's the aorist tense, a tense unbound by time, that makes him want to crawl into a closet and huddle in the darkness." Zeno, trying his hand at translation of old text, briefly mentions what I think has a lot of the author in him here. It displays a similar reaction I have to present tense. It literally makes my frontal lobes ache. My forehead protests. It's a visceral reaction that can sometimes be overcome — depending on how and why (and when) it is used by an author. I hated it here. Maybe I could forgive it in Konstance's story — and maybe I could forgive it in the present day portion of Zeno's and Seymour's encounter. But not the whole book. I'm exhausted by present tense. Dip into it now and then, but all of one book cannot and should not exist in the now, the immediate.

It's like watching a mime perform the ol' stuck in an invisible box trick, while a little voice over my shoulder delivers, in a near-whisper, narration like a golf commentator. Pretty soon it becomes noise. Gimmicky noise. I get the desire to pin the story from the mid-15th century to now, bring it into today, trying to make it feel real and tangible. I understand it, but I don't like that this is the only way authors sometimes feel it can be accomplished. It's a poor substitute for actually fulfilling this goal through the actual words.

While I found Konstance's story the most compelling, it was also the most obvious one — feeling more "M. Night Shyamalan" by the end than was probably the intention. I lost interest in the converging storylines from Constantinople by halfway through and skimmed those for the most part. Picking up when it felt necessary or when I hoped it might be. And though I did enjoy the majority of Zeno's whole story — some of his wartime was far too drawn out — Zeno felt less and less like a flesh-and-blood person as the book neared the end. Which brings me to Seymour.

I adored both boys' childhoods. Really. Doerr is wonderful with these two young characters, but the demand of his overall plot causes these two to be thinned out and watered down.

Seymour is introduced very early on — so this is not a spoiler; it's at 2% on my Kindle – as a young adult with a bomb in his backpack. His plan is, by use of the adjacent wall from the library's side, to destroy part of the realty office next door. This plan predictably goes awry when a helpful library associate tries to return the loaded backpack back to Seymour. Seymour, like Zeno, has his development displayed through the utilization of flashbacks. In those flashbacks, we see a Seymour who clearly is displaying something akin to being on the autism spectrum — it's just never stated absolutely.

He doesn't like loud noises, gets easily overstimulated, lashes out, wanders off, and —once discovered— makes use of some gun-range ear protection headset to quiet his head and calm him. Later he is on medication. I hated everything about making this kid a villain, making him a dupe and the troubled mental health patient who has this potential for great harm. It's exactly the wrong narrative to continue to spin and I cannot find any reason for it. This was unforgivable.

Though Doerr managed to capture my attention in the wonderful All the Light We Cannot See — which was written in present tense and which was easier to accept because of the understanding that comes with the threat of Nazis as has been absolutely ingrained in our collective consciousness — I'm not sure I will be so apt to jump willingly into his next work.

Thank you Netgalley for the advanced copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land. This book is not my typical genre and it took a bit for me to get into and at times a bit hard to follow..
Set in Constantinople in the fifteenth century, in a small town in present-day Idaho, and on an interstellar ship decades from now, Anthony Doerr’s gorgeous third novel is a triumph of imagination and compassion, a soaring story about children on the cusp of adulthood in worlds in peril, who find resilience, hope—and a book. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Doerr has created a magnificent tapestry of times and places that reflects our vast interconnectedness—with other species, with each other, with those who lived before us, and with those who will be here after we’re gone.

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.

A puzzling story centered around an ancient manuscript telling the tale of Aethon and its effect on children in different places and centuries.

The book has three alternating stories tied together by the ancient Antonius Diogenes tale, Cloud Cuckoo Land. We meet two people in 15th century Constantinople, two people in 20th & 21st century Idaho, and a final character at some point in the future on an interstellar ship escaping our ruined planet. I found it very easy to get involved with each of the main characters, although it took a bit to understand what was happening. I found all of the settings fascinating and the characters complex and interesting.

Beautiful writing by one of my favorite authors.

“Cloud cuckoo land is a state of absurdly, over-optimistic fantasy or an unrealistically idealistic state where everything is perfect. Someone who is said to "live in cloud cuckoo land" is a person who thinks that things that are completely impossible might happen, rather than understanding how things really are.”-Wikipedia

Anthony Doerr is a brilliant magician. A sorcerer of sentence structure. A wizard of word choice. He waves a wand and lyrical stories are created for readers to escape into. It may have taken him 10 years to pen All The Light We Cannot See, and another 7 to publish this one, but both were worth the wait. Once again I found myself re-reading passages for the sheer beauty contained in is storytelling. I requested this ARC based on loving his previous two books, and this was unlike anything I’ve ever read. At over 600 pages it’s almost like having 3 books in one, as he weaves a fictional tale about an ancient writer’s story of desiring to live as a bird in a mystical Cloud Cuckoo Land through 5 sets of characters in 3 different time periods; 1400 Constantinople, current day Idaho, and a futuristic space travel machine. Bazaar, right? Odd and nonconforming? It was. But it was also thoroughly engrossing and at its center was the importance and power of passing down and preserving stories so that they never die.

Pub Day for this one is at the end of the month and I anticipate it will generate a lot of buzz. Wholly original and epic in its breadth and dimension.

I had a hard time getting into this novel for the first 50% of the story. The second half, when things become a little clearer and start coming together is when the narrative got much more interesting for me.

We start out with six characters from varying times and places, including an ancient text that may or may not have been translated correctly and in proper order, and it isn’t apparent how these are all related. The first half of the book, jumps in time and place. To add to the confusion, two of the characters storylines jump between the present and their pasts. For this reason I think it might even be more confusing if one listens to the story as an audiobook. I had to continually refer back to the chapter headings for dates and the overall chronology.

This story though filled with a lot of sadness, is thought provoking. So many novels these days have an underlying environmental message built in to the story. Genre: environmental fiction? It also seems to be popular right now to write one book containing several character’s stories that are then brought together at the end. For me, this resulted in not knowing enough of each character’s story (with the exception of Zeno who I felt was most focused on) and then an incredibly fast slippery-slope wrap up at the end. Omeir and Anna’s story in particular felt a little shorted.

But I enjoyed the second half, and it was interesting to see how everyone’s stories came together, and progressed into the future. I do recommend this with the warning that it starts out a bit confusing.

This has been, correctly I feel, compared to Cloud Atlas.

A rich and complex book that's brilliantly written. The novel takes place across different timelines and multiple points of view. Rich world building, inspiring. Elements of magic, fantasy, and sci-fi. Definitely an innovative premise and a thought provoking story, different than anything I've read in awhile.

I tried to like this book. At one-third of the way, I decided that I couldn’t finish reading it. I loved All The Light We Cannot See by this author and that is why I chose to read this novel. If you are a fan of mythology, fantasy and sci-fi you should read it. Three time periods are featured starting in 1452, current and ending in the future. No doubt this book will be highly rated, though these genres are not books I choose to read.

Before reading "Cloud Cuckoo Land," I thought it was impossible for Anthony Doerr to reach the heights he did in "All the Light We Cannot See" for a second time. I was very wrong. This book is the PERFECT book for the moment, when we need some hope to cling to in a world that seems like it's falling apart.

I was reminded of David Mitchell's masterpiece, "Cloud Atlas"... Multiple storylines across vast stretches of time. Sometimes that can be a chore to read, because authors will go on and on for one plot line and I will forget what was happening in the other ones. Doerr keeps the pace brisk, and the book is actually quite thrilling! I had heard that it was a dramedy before reading. I guess that could be someone's take on it, but I was very stressed out through several parts (anything with a bomb freaks me out) and VERY moved by the ending.

Anthony Doerr's writing is SO emotional. I didn't like this book, I LOVE LOVE LOVED it. I am going to purchase a ticket to the Zoom interview/signed book from Barnes and Noble because I want this book on my shelf. I will HAPPILY recommend this book to anyone who will listen. I am going to add my Instagram book review, but I am posting new book reviews on their release days, so I haven't posted it yet. It won't be this exact review (I usually add a plot description) but it will be a rave review.

Wow! This book is so different! It is beautifully written, as the story weaves in and out. It is intricately put together as each character plays an important part, the importance of which the reader cannot be sure until almost the very end.

Anna and Omeir live in the 1400’s. Anna finds the story of Aethon, a man who dreams of becoming a bird so that he can fly. She reads this book to her dying sister. She saves and protects the book because it is so special to her. Omeir is an oxen driver. He and Anna will meet.

In 2020, 86-year-old Zeno and five local children are practicing a play based on Aethon’s story at the public library. Zeno has translated the play from the original Greek and has a special love for it. However, Seymour steps into the picture and creates his own special havoc.

Sometime in the future, Konstance lives on an interstellar ship. Her father tells her the story of Aethon, with which she falls in love. However, there is much more that Konstance finds out as she looks for more clues about the story of Aethon and where her father got his own information about the book.

The whole book is bound together by how this story travels through time and its importance to the people that it touches. But there is so much more to it than that.
There is mystery and drama and love and romance, and it is told in such a way that the reader is carried away right up until the last page.

So good! I highly recommend it!

I'd like to thank NetGalley, Anthony Doerr, and Scribner for the advanced reader's copy in exchange for my unbiased review.