Reviews tagging 'Hate crime'

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

5 reviews

carla20's review against another edition

adventurous dark emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective sad medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Colonisation, Confinement, Death, Hate crime, War, and Gun violence

Moderate: Bullying, Injury/Injury detail, Racism, and Mass/school shootings

betsygrace's review against another edition

adventurous challenging mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

I see why this won awards! It was a little slow for me at first but once the action picked up, I was hooked! I could never have imagined these stories intertwining the way that they did. 

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Content Warnings

Moderate: Pandemic/Epidemic, Violence, Medical trauma, Eating disorder, Abandonment, Colonisation, Confinement, Death, Mass/school shootings, Murder, Hate crime, Medical content, Gun violence, and War

naomi_k's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional inspiring tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Gore, Racism, Blood, Bullying, Death, Forced institutionalization, Abandonment, Xenophobia, Chronic illness, Confinement, Dysphoria, War, Grief, Gun violence, Injury/Injury detail, Panic attacks/disorders, Religious bigotry, and Violence

Moderate: Fire/Fire injury, Hate crime, Animal death, and Homophobia

Minor: Medical content, Miscarriage, Pregnancy, Child death, Excrement, Alcohol, Sexual content, Misogyny, Child abuse, and Domestic abuse

thebakerbookworm's review against another edition

adventurous challenging hopeful mysterious reflective sad slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This book has a lot of moving parts, many narrators and timelines, and listening to the audio, it did take me a while to get into it. I was confused for a lot of the first half. We have five different perspectives: Konstance, sometime in the future where she's spent her whole life on a spaceship; Zeno and Seymour, both from Idaho and living in the modern present day; and then young Anna and Omeir, in fifteenth century Constantinople, as it's about to fall. On top of all that, we also have a story within a story going on. The narrative jumps around from each of them a lot, and it definitely took me a while to get my bearing.

That being said, once I got a good grasp of the story, I was invested. There's excellent storytelling going on here, almost mesmerizing. I was most interested in the future and present timelines—everything about the spaceship and Konstance was fascinating, and Zeno stole my heart. I love a book where disjointed storylines suddenly make sense at the end, when you see how the thread of connection was running through them the whole time, and that's exactly what happened here. The last third of this book really made me love it.

It's hard to describe this book and what it made me feel, but I think it's best described as an ode to storytelling and how stories can connect us across space and time. I do perhaps wish some different editing choices were made in the first half, but if you can trudge through it, the ending is definitely worth it.

Thanks so much to Libro.fm, Simon Audio, and the author for my ALC!

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Ableism, Bullying, Death, Grief, Hate crime, Homophobia, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Racism, Violence, and War

leahjanespeare's review against another edition

adventurous hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

4.5

It starts with a book. A humble, whimsical fable of Ancient Greece. This fable then manages to connect people across a thousand years. From the fall of Constantinople to an interstellar journey to another planet, I felt the collective longing across the web of characters all searching for the unattainable utopian state in life. A quiet epic so like the ancients it pulls from, Doerr has created a meta masterpiece that’s wholly immersive and begging for awards.  

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Content Warnings

Minor: Hate crime and Homophobia