Hopeful in this Day and Age? Review of Cloud Cuckoo Land

 I recently watched a panel discussion on writing horror in the age of a pandemic. It was sponsored by the Skeleton Hour and the Horror Writers Association. The authors involved (I'm sorry. I don't remember all of their names) thought that more hopeful books, even in horror, will be the trend. They also saw climate change as a future trend in horror.

With that in mind, I'm printing my review of Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. It's not considered horror but it does have lots of war, a pandemic, and some science fiction. Thanks to Netgalley and Scribner for letting me get a first look at Cloud Cuckoo Land which will be available for sale in September. 

Wow, oh wow.

All the Light We Can Not See was so good that I didn't think Anthony Doerr could top himself.

But, he sure did with Cloud Cuckoo Land.

There's something for everybody. The future scenes are like science fiction with an all-knowing presence named Sybil controlling the "spaceship." There's two wars, the siege of Constantinople in the 1400'.s and the Korean War, and there is an ancient book that manages to show up across thousands of years.  Ultimately, it is a book about survival, family, love, religious intolerance (a child and his family are persecuted because he was born with a cleft pallet, a sign of God's disfavor) and the love of knowledge.  It may be one of the first great climate change books of the 21st Century.

It also points out the things we're still struggling with a thousand, two thousand years later. The shepherd is poor, the family shunned by their religion is poor, the girls in Constantinople who embroider for a living are poor, Bunny, the mother of a main character in 2020, struggles to find jobs cleaning hotel rooms to support her son. It seems like we can never defeat poverty.

But, like I said, ultimately it is a hopeful book and one that will dwell in my mind for a long time.

Does all this sound like a downer? It's not. It left me with a hopeful feeling, that we will get through this. It's also so beautifully written that I sometimes felt as if I were walking through a dream.