Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr was the first book I finished this year and I am so happy that it enabled me to start out a new reading year with a 5 star read that I loved!!!
This book captured my heart and imagination. I was pulled in by the characters in all three story lines and loved the way this epic novel celebrates books and their importance in an ever changing world.
The author utilizes three settings in Cloud Cuckoo Land with three gripping characters with compelling stories.
First, there is thirteen-year-old Anna in fifteenth century Constantinople–a city on the brink of war. Anna is an orphan who lives inside the walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Despite all odds, Anna learns to read and finds a book, the story of Aethon, that becomes an important element in all three time periods and story lines.
Then there is Zeno, an older man who learned Greek as a prisoner of war. He is currently rehearsing a play with five school aged children that is an adaption of the Aethon story in a library in Idaho. They are unaware of a crisis playing out on the ground floor of the library as teenage boy Seymour is planting a bomb.
Lastly, there is Konstance, herself a teenager on board the interstellar ship Argos in a future time decades from now. After a contagious outbreak on board, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacks the story of Aethon as it was told to her by her father.
These three stories are connected by one thing–the written word–the story of Aethon, a shepherd who longs to be a bird so he can fly to a paradise in the sky and never long for more than what he has.
Cloud Cuckoo Land is a book that celebrates the importance of books and the beauty of humanity in an interesting and intriguing way that I couldn’t resist. It is a long book, but it was a quick read for me as I was completely captivated by the storytelling and writing.
“But as he reconstructs Zeno’s translation, he realizes that the truth is infinitely more complicated, that we are all beautiful even as we are all part of the problem, and that to be a part of the problem is to be human.”
This book would be wonderful for readers who like beautiful writing and are fans of historical fiction and or science-fiction/fantasy. It has all of that and more!
This was surprisingly different the author’s previous work, All the Light We Cannot See, which he won a Pulitzer Prize for. It has been many years since I read that book, so I didn’t go into this with expectations of it being similar.