Enjoy the following guest post by Jim Goodell, a former coworker of mine. We both worked as federal contractors. We were both laid off in early 2025, due to DOGE. (If you’d like to write a guest post for this blog, view my guidelines.)

ANTHONY DOERR HAS BECOME one of my favorite authors. I love his vivid prose, the development of his characters, and the way he interweaves the lives of very different characters from very different cultures. I love his books so much that on my first trip to mainland Europe in 2023, I carved out time to visit a small coastal town featured in one of his books.

Book Tour

In spring of 2023, my daughter Abigail was studying in Florence, Italy, for a semester. I turned a pilgrimage to visit her into a kind of “book tour.” I had been the lead editor on a book published in 2022 called Learning Engineering Toolkit and had some requests to speak about it. My stops included an event hosted by the Open University at the Royal Geographical Society at Hyde Park in London, a visit with a colleague in Edinburgh, a UNESCO event in Paris, and a talk at a research university in Barcelona. But there was one stop that was not part of the book tour, a four day diversion to Saint-Malo: a small, walled village on the coast of France that had been featured prominently in Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize winning book All the Light We Cannot See.

You may be familiar with the book through its adaptation as a Netflix miniseries starring Aria Mia Loberti, Mark Ruffalo, and Hugh Laurie. It tells the story of Marie-Laure LeBlanc, who has been blind since she was six, and her father Daniel. They escape Paris when the Nazis invade in May 1940, and take refuge in a tall, narrow six-story house at 4 rue Vauborel on the southeast side of St. Malo. It’s the home of Marie-Laure’s great-uncle Etienne, a reclusive veteran of World War I who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Etienne spends most of his time in his attic communicating over a radio transmitter, a key to the plot of the story.

We also follow Werner Pfennig, a German orphan who is a couple of years older than Marie-Laure. But I won’t get into that because this post isn’t a review of All the Light We Cannot See; it’s a review of Cloud Cuckoo Land.

Inanimate Characters

The point I want to make is that Anthony Doerr has an amazing way of making places and things key characters in his stories. One of those “characters” in All the Light We Cannot See is a model of the city made by Marie-Laure’s dad, to help his blind daughter learn to navigate her new surroundings. Her interactions with the model, described by Doerr, help us to “see” the place as she does: the tall narrow house at 4 rue Vauborel, the ceremonial cannons pointing out to sea, the star-shaped outline of the walled city, and the narrow streets. Objects paint vivid pictures and become their own characters: the radio in the attic, a key, an iron gate blocking access to the ocean, and a mystical diamond known as the Sea of Flames.

On my own adventure to St. Malo I got to meet some of those “characters.” I stayed at the lovely Hôtel Les Chiens du Guet, just blocks away from the real 4 rue Vauborel house that Doerr transformed into a character in his novel. I spent three days walking around the city listening to the audiobook of All the Light We Cannot See, visiting the ceremonial cannons, walking on the parapet of the city walls, and listening to the gulls and the surf as Marie-Laure had. Sometimes I stood and closed my eyes, imagining the heightened sense of hearing and smell that a blind girl from the 1940s might have experienced.

In the Cloud

This leads me to my favorite novel Cloud Cuckoo Land. Like in All the Light We Cannot See, it is historic fiction—set in 15th-century Constantinople, but also in present-day Idaho, and in the future in a space ship hurtling away from Earth. I’m a big fan of historical fiction, sci-fi, and fantasy; this book has it all.

As in All the Light We Cannot See, Doerr introduces an inanimate object as a key “character” in Cloud Cuckoo Land. An ancient manuscript records a myth of Aethon, a foolish yet hopeful shepherd who longs to reach a utopian city in the clouds. In his quest, he undergoes a series of comic and tragic transformations—becoming a donkey, a fish, and finally a bird—each shift reflecting both his resilience and his folly. The tale of Aethon’s quest for transformation becomes a connective thread, linking children in fifteenth-century Constantinople, prisoners in a modern-day Idaho library, and voyagers aboard a future spacecraft. Aethon’s persistence reveals a deep human yearning for transcendence and belonging shared by other characters in the novel. This along with the uncertainty of the survival of the manuscript itself makes it an active participant in the novel’s drama.

The novel also has some other non-human characters—a pair of twin oxen called Tree and Midnight, an owl named Trustyfriend, a great bronze cannon, an artificial intelligence called Sybil, and a small-town library in Idaho. The following passage from the novel, about the small-town library, illustrates Doerr’s skill in description:

“The Lakeport Public Library is a high-gabled two-story gingerbread Victorian on the corner of Lake and Park that was donated to the town after the First World War. Its chimney leans; its gutters sag; packing tape holds together cracks in three of the four front-facing windows. Several inches of snow have already settled on the junipers flanking the walk and atop the book drop box on the corner, which has been painted to look like an owl.”

In Cloud Cuckoo Land we follow Anna, a 13-year-old orphan who lives inside the walls of Constantinople, and Omeir, a village boy with a cleft pallet conscripted to join Mehmed the Conqueror’s siege on Constantinople. Five hundred years later, we follow a troubled teenager, Seymour, as well as the life of an old man named Zeno Ninis, from when he moved to Idaho with his dad when he was 7 all the way to his 80s.

The story follows Anna as she learns to read Greek and finds a book with a mythical story of Aethon, who longs to turn into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian place in the sky. Meanwhile we meet Omeir and follow his journey with the Ottoman Army to Constantinople with his family’s oxen, Tree and Moonlight, as they pull the great bronze cannon.

Five hundred years later, Zeno, in his 80s, has translated the remaining remnants of Aethon’s story, and is rehearsing a play adaptation with five children on the second floor of the Lakeport Public Library.

Meanwhile, Seymour, a teenager on the autism spectrum, who relates better to animals than people, is downstairs in the library. Seymour has a strong sense of environmental injustice fueled by a childhood relationship with an owl he named Trustyfriend who was displaced (or perished) when a housing development destroyed its habitat. With a desire for revenge he has taken drastic action.

And sometime in the future, Konstance is alone in the vault of a spaceship, having never set foot on Earth, trying to recall the story of Aethon as it had been told to her by her father.

For me Doerr’s words paint pictures so vivid that at times I feel like I become the characters—Anna, Omeir, Seymour, Zeno and Konstance. I see what they see and feel what they feel.

Yearning for More

Reading this fiction book made me want to learn more about the nonfiction historical context of the Imperial Library of Constantinople, the fall of Constantinople and the military technology of the time (the great bronze gun) that helped the Ottomans capture the city. It also made me curious about the cultures portrayed and how they have evolved through the messiness of history.

Doerr dedicated the book to “the librarians then, now, and in the years to come” which connects to the thread that weaves together the characters across history, the preservation of a story. This reinforces the idea that the main character in Cloud Cuckoo Land is Aethon’s story.

For someone who loves several genres (historic fiction, fantasy, and sci-fi) and loves to learn about history and cultures, this book weaves them all together with perfection. And for anyone who loves great storytelling and rich character development, Cloud Cuckoo Land is worth checking out.

Jim Goodell mostly writes nonfiction. His latest is Meaning in Life in an AI-dominated Future, authored with his twin brother Gary. It’s for anyone who recently lost a job or is afraid that artificial intelligence will take their job or disrupt their life. It offers hope and guidance in this moment of upheaval—a roadmap to thriving and living a life that remains fully, unmistakably human. Jim is also editor and co-author of Learning Engineering Toolkit. He volunteers as Chair of the IEEE Learning Technology Standards Committee and is founder of INFERable, a Public Benefit Corporation. Meanwhile, Jim is working to develop skills for fiction writing. His partially completed novel “Enlightened Human Dimensions” is about a teenage girl’s experience with a new technology that unlocks a renaissance of the human mind. You can find Jim on LinkedIn.

Featured in this post: Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr Buy it here
Also mentioned: All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr Buy it here

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