Cloud Cuckoo Land

There's a lot to like in Cloud Cuckoo Land: the prose is just as pretty as you would expect from the author of “All the Light We Cannot See.” The characters are varied, charming, a bit morally gray at times, but easy to cheer for. The frame story is an ancient Greek fable that's hilarious and touching, and his love for storytelling and the power of books is tangible everywhere. And I learned a whole lot about the world of the Byzantine empire's final days before Constantinople fell to the Turks, which was a fascinating corner of world history I'd never come across before. In addition to that world, there's also a Korean War veteran from Idaho and a teenage boy living near him who becomes an environmental terrorist, plus a girl in a spaceship far in the future. Each of these settings is thoughtful and comes alive in Doerr's hands.

Cons:

There are still so many different things happening that, while it's never exactly hard to keep track of, it's still a bit disorienting/disjointed. (Although the two young girls did bleed together in my mind a bit since I felt like they had similar personalities and a similar dilemma.) You end up having 5 main characters spread across 3.5 timelines, plus the framing story of the Greek myth. That's a LOT of balls in the air at once. Although the themes of the framing story generally hold them together, and there's lots of overlapping symbolism, at the end of the day I felt like they were loosely connected novellas instead of a cohesive story. Some books are able to make that multifaceted of a plot fit together as tightly and thoughtfully as a jigsaw puzzle (Station Eleven in particular comes to mind).

(As a final aside on the ‘plus' side, this book has a good amount of similarities in its goals to “The Starless Sea” by Erin Morgenstern, but this one's much, much better. So if you were ever thinking of reading Starless Sea, read this one instead)