I picked up Cloud Cuckoo Land rather impulsively from Costco a few weeks ago. I was definitely interested in reading it at some point as it is a novel that involves multiple timelines and multiple characters that are somehow all interconnected, but I did not intend on reading it so soon because my TBR pile is completely out of control. This novel sounded just too interesting to put off, though. Thematically, it was not what I was expecting as it is a novel about the destructiveness of human nature, specifically as it has manifested in climate change. But it is also about finding hope for our future. I cannot say that I one hundred percent enjoyed reading Cloud Cuckoo Land as it triggered my climate anxiety, but it is a fascinating and richly told novel. It is also long; it took me about two weeks of pre-bedtime reading to get through it.

Cloud Cuckoo Land jumps back and forth across three different timelines. In chronological order, there is 15th century Constantinople, which focuses on 13-year-old orphan Anna, who lives inside the walls of Constantinople, and a boy who lives outside the city named Omeir, who has been conscripted into an army that plans on attacking the city because of his special bond with his oxen. It does not take any foreshadowing to know that Anna and Omeir will eventually cross paths. Then there is present day Lakeport, Idaho, which focuses on Zeno, an old man who is helping a group of kids rehearse a play at the town library, and Seymour, a teenage boy with a deep love for nature, and who intends to plant a bomb in the library. Lastly, there is decades in the future on a spaceship called the Argos that is taking a group of humans to colonize a distant planet, including ten-year-old Konstance, whose dad used to live on Earth.

The timelines and the characters are all linked by an ancient Greek text called Cloud Cuckoo Land, a story about the misadventures of a man named Aethon who wishes to be turned into a bird to that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. Anna finds the text in an abandoned library in Constantinople and teaches herself how to read it. The text is rediscovered in the present day at the Vatican and Zeno translates it into English; he then befriends a group of children who decide to turn it into a play. And in the future, Konstance, locked alone in a room with the Argos’ AI, writes this favourite story of hers down as it was told to her by her father.

Cloud Cuckoo Land (Doerr’s novel) is well researched and meticulously plotted. I was intrigued by each of the main characters and their narratives, including bomb-making Seymour, but I was perhaps most intrigued by Kontance’s narrative as I am always interested in other people’s visions of the future.

Climate change and the destruction of our planet can be a heavy and depressing subject to read about, but I feel like there is a bit of hope. I feel this hope every time I see young people like Greta Thunberg (and the fictional Seymour) fighting for their future. I just hope it is not too late before us adults find our love for our planet again, instead of spending our billions on flying rockets into space.