Coming to you from Cloud Cuckoo Land
Konstance is 14. She lives on an interstellar spacecraft sometime in the future. She’s hurtling through space with a supercomputer as her companion. She didn’t sign up for this. All she wants is home, family, to touch nature, and to breathe outside air.
Seymour lives in modern-day Idaho. He grew up battling his own mind and the latchkey kid world he was forced to live in. The library and the wonders of nature in the woods behind his house were his only refuge. One was stolen from him, and now he’s been convinced to blow up the other. But things aren’t going as planned. He’s shot someone. He’s in trouble.
Zeno was a prisoner of war in Korea in the early 1950s. Now, he’s an old man who volunteers at the library and is changing the lives of young children with his kindness and his talented adaptation of ancient stories for children’s theater. He hears the gunshot but doesn’t quite know how best to protect the children in this moment. His former life in Korea comes rushing back.
Anna’s life in fifteenth-century Constantinople is bleak. She and her sister are orphans. They live and work all-day shifts with the seamstresses who make elaborate vestments for priests. Their city is under siege. Anna is heartbroken, hungry, and cold. And yet, she keeps going, keeps loving, keeps living somehow.
Omeir also has a bleak life in the fifteenth-century region of Constantinople. Or at least his life has become bleak in recent months. Born with a cleft lip and palate in a time when the condition was seen as demonic, he’s been dealing with hardship since he was born, but nothing like the hardship that began six months ago, when he was taken by the army and forced into hard labor in support of the forces attacking Anna’s city. His best friends, a pair of oxen, have died, and he’s trying to get home.
What unites them across the centuries is their private search for significance and the enduring power of a story that persists.
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This is Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. It was published in 2021, to much acclaim — and if you ask me, it’s just as good or better than Doerr’s Pulitzer winner All The Light We Cannot See (which I also deeply loved and haven’t yet watched the TV series because I can’t imagine how it could possibly compare).
It’s sci-fi.
It’s realism.
It’s historical fiction.
Also, it’s a love story — especially for story lovers.
Y’all. I’m loving this book so much I can’t even tell you. I cannot believe I’ve waited so long to start reading it.
As of this writing, I’m on page 390. With only 232 pages to go, I simultaneously want to devour the rest and drag it out, savor it, and make it last — I can’t wait to see what happens next, but I desperately don’t want it to end.
How in the world we humans have within us the ability to create such compelling stories out of thin air, and how I bought a copy of this story for only $8 at my local used bookshop, enchants me, inspires me, and blows my little mind.
This is what being a reader is all about.
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It’s starting to turn very chilly here in Maine. The wind has a bite, and the clouds are so thick most days I’ve started to think of the sky as white instead of blue. A comfy couch with Cloud Cuckoo Land and a cuppa is calling my name. My weekend is fully booked (pun intended).
Whatever’s going on in your world right now, I hope you have a cozy-good weekend ahead, too. And should you find yourself wanting to chat about Cloud Cuckoo Land, any book you love or hate, or anything really, I’m only an email away.
Always.
💛
Celeste
P.S. Thank you to everyone who reached out with concerned get-well-soon responses after last week’s message — I’m doing much better now, after spending a few small fortunes on tons of Advil and a brand-new rolling suitcase at the airport, and a heating pad and massage therapy session when I returned home. Getting old is expensive, but hey, old is the goal, right? 💛 💛 💛
did AI write this? nope, this lady did ⤴ always💛