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A review by etemp
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

3.5

imagine a book where there are six different stories but they've all been chopped up precisely at the points where they start to get exciting, laid out haphazardly on a table like a pack of cards, and primitively shuffled by moving them around at random. the resulting pile would be something like this book.

this is one of those times where i can appreciate how much thought and genius went into a book, but it doesn't automatically translate to my overall enjoyment. it was definitely helpful to listen to the audiobook, but every time i picked it up after not touching it for a day or two, it took me so long to figure out where all the characters had left off. so that was tough.

like a lot of others have mentioned, i had a big huge issue with the way the autistic-coded kid was written. it felt really icky to me that he wound up being sucked into such radical and dangerous ideology, of all the characters. it felt like the problematic "those people are just more gullible" kind of characterization, even if it wasn't meant that way. it was just disappointing from an author with such a strong creativity to develop all kinds of characters.

i did really enjoy the endings that everyone got (for zeno, i enjoyed the publishing of his translation and legacy), and i loved watching all the threads get tied together. it was just a bit of a commitment to get there.
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