Teen Seymour and 80-year-old Zeno Ninis participate in activities at the Lakeport Public Library, which has an ideal librarian named Marian.

Sources of resilience and hope in the face of vividly- described peril are revealed as we become acquainted with each character.Īnna and Omeir, in their teen years, have dramatically different experiences of Constantinople. Four children in their teens and one man in his eighties are immersed in the challenges of their times. The author has created five plot lines set in the past, present and future (not necessarily in that order!) Constantinople in the fifteenth century, Lakeport, Idaho in the present and an interstellar ship, The Argos, decades from now are the backdrop for the development of the main characters. Anthony Doerr creates his own version of a similar play by an imaginary writer, Antonius Diogenes, and words from the title are used as touchstones throughout his intertwining stories.

The curious title of this novel was inspired by The Birds, a work of Aristophanes, the Greek playwright. The four-paragraph version: Cloud Cuckoo Land is about a book and how it manages to survive across time.Resident Janet Neer’s review of Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, is scheduled for Tuesday, Maat 7 PM in the Auditorium. It follows three sets of characters in different time periods who all come across a (fictional) ancient Greek tale called Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes. In the 1400's in Constantinople, Anna is an orphan who finds a copy of Cloud Cuckoo Land in an abandoned priory library just before it is destroyed by Saracen forces. Meanwhile, Omeir is a boy who is forced to join the Saracen army. In present day (in 2020), Seymour is a 17-year-old environmental activist who tries to set off a bomb at the local library.

Meanwhile, Zeno is an old man who is at the library afterhours, leading a group of kids in a rehearsal for a performance of Cloud Cuckoo Land. And sometime in the future, Konstance is a girl on Argos, an intergenerational ship that is on a 592-year-long journey with a mission to reach a distant planet. She ends up isolated after a plague kills everyone else on board. Throughout the narrative, the contents of Cloud Cuckoo Land is interwoven in bits and pieces.

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