Review: Cloud Cuckoo Land

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I think what happened is the author read David Mitchel’s “Cloud Atlas” and said to himself “I can run with that.” You get the related tales over time, told in disordered chunks instead building from past to future back to past like “Cloud Atlas”. But you get some sense of relatedness. What I didn’t get was cohesiveness. I remember thinking while reading this that Doerr writes beautiful sentences and paragraphs. But on reflection, a week after finishing the work, I recall very little, including the "whys" within the story. I wasn't bowled over by the relationships between characters that really struck me in "All the Light We Cannot See". Not nearly as memorable as his earlier book.

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