Many thanks to NetGalley and Scribner for gifting me a digital copy of the new title by Anthony Doerr, who wrote the amazing All the Light We Cannot See - 4 stars!
Told in three different centuries by 5 different voices, all interspersed with a Greek fairytale of sorts about Aethon, a boy who longs to become a bird so he can fly to paradise in the sky. In the 1400s, Anna is living in a convent in Constantinople, behind closed walls, with her sister. Anna learns to read and finds Aethon's story, which she reads to her sickly sister. Omeir is a young boy who is forced from his home and tasked to lead his oxen into invading the city where Anna lives. In the 1940s-present day, we meet Zeno who learned to read Greek in the war and is now elderly and instructing a small group of youngsters at a libraryIn Idaho to perform a play of Aethon's story. There we meet Seymour, a young environmental idealist. In the future, Konstance has lived her entire life on an interstellar ship, Argos, with her family. Her father reads the fairytale to her as well.
Whew - that's a lot! This is a beautifully written, very ambitious novel, that at 640 pages is somewhat daunting. But you get caught up in all these interconnected stories and as the chapters turned, I was anxious to read more about each of these different worlds. To me, this is what reading is about - finding a book that will transport you into other worlds, listening to other voices. This book shows how powerful a story can be, because an old Greek story survived, through the protection and diligence of many individuals, to be such an important part of other's lives.
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