A review by taizuken
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

adventurous hopeful inspiring mysterious reflective 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? Yes

4.5

"A half-dozen times she has stared at this painting, and each time something stirs inside her, some inarticulable sense of the pull of distant places, of the immensity of the world and her own smallness inside it."

"I had flown so far, I had proven everyone wrong. Yet as I perched on my balcony and peered past the happy flocking birds, over the gates, and the ruffled edges of the clouds, down at the patchwork mud-heap of earth far below, where the cities teemed and the herds, wild and tame, drifted like dust across the plains, I wondered about my friends, and my little bed, and the ewes I'd left behind in the field. I had traveled so far, and it was all so magnificent, yet..."
[...] Why did I leave? Why this compulsion to be elsewhere? To constantly seek something new? Was hope a curse, the last evil left in Pandora's Jar?"

"Why can't healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone-you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themsleves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you're never the same: not quite."