A review by bhnmt61
Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr

I’m not rating this because my disappointment in this book is almost entirely because of personal peeves. I was really looking forward to it because the blurb sounded great, but I discovered while reading that I am heartily sick of two techniques Doerr uses throughout the 500+ pages. For one, the entire thing is written in present tense. Twenty years ago, this felt exciting and fresh, now it just feels exhausting. And the other is the extremely common technique of jumping back and forth between several different characters/times in order to build suspense. It makes me irritated— just when you’re really getting absorbed in one character’s story, you are suddenly pulled out of it to switch to another. I’ve read any number of novels that use this technique, and there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but I’m just tired of it (a feeling that’s been building for awhile- I almost quit reading The Bone Clocks last year because of it). I read about two hundred pages and then flipped over and read the last 50. I’m not sure I missed anything. It was not for me.