This story starts at the end and weaves through several timelines and perspectives to demonstrate the importance of storytelling and the teachers we create for ourselves. The winding thread is a partially recovered manuscript in Ancient Greek, which tells the story of a fantastical, mythical comedic hero who wants to become an owl but finds himself as a donkey, a fish, and a crow before he ultimately reaches the book of all knowledge and the story concludes. With overlapping timelines, we eventually learn that Anna (a young Greek girl in the Constantinople of 1450) discovers the manuscript in a monastery on a mission to sell parchment and earn money for her starving community of embroideresses. The story follows the trail through the centuries, disappearing and reappearing until it reaches Zeno and the group of five children putting on a play in the Lakeport library in February, 2020 when Seymour, a troubled teen with a passion for climate preservation, attempts to detonate a bomb in his childhood refuge in order to destroy the real estate agency next door. We also meet Omeir, an infant with a cleft lip who grows into a talented yokesman and finds himself part of the Ottoman army seeking to destroy the walls of Constantinople, though he deserts the company when his two oxen, his childhood companions, die on the road. We learn more about Zeno, whose father was killed in the Second World War, leaving him an orphan in Lakeport, Idaho, under the care of a woman who makes him anxious. Zeno spends his afternoons in the company of the local librarians, discovering the wonders of ancient Greek stories until he enlists himself and winds up a prisoner of war in Korea, where he meets a British soldier with similar passions and a handsome demeanor. Eventually released, Zeno is desperate to learn if Rex’s escape attempt was successful, thrilled to receive an invitation to visit him in England, and heartbroken to be hosted by Rex and his boyfriend, Hillary. When Rex dies on a document-discovering mission in Egypt, Hillary sends Zeno his research notes, including a summary of this very manuscript, reigniting Zeno’s own enthusiasm for translation and returns him to the library, where he is eventually gratified with the reports of the discovery in Italy of the manuscript his would-be lover found mention of in Egypt. Decades in the future, Konstance lives on Argos, a self-sustaining orb en route to a safe planet, which will take 592 years to reach. Her father, a devoted botanist, tells her the story of this same manuscript from memory until a contagion shows up on the ship, and Konstance’s father comes up with a secret plot to save his daughter, isolating her in the vault with Sybil, the all-knowing intelligence base (who doesn’t know everything after all).

This book is brilliant and filled with echoes and beautiful sentences. When I opened it up, I knew it would take me a while to feel immersed, and I was admittedly uncertain about the Ancient Greek allusions, the battle scenes, and the futuristic science fiction elements (so basically all of it), but within a hundred pages, I was totally engaged, empathizing with every character. What I also appreciate about Doerr is that he trusts his reader’s intelligence, believing that we’ll pick up on the allusions that he mentions, the language play, and the parallels between characters and timelines. 



Don Quixote - a story within a story with mysterious origins
Klara and the Sun - the advantages and drawbacks of artificial intelligence and its impact on social life
Station Eleven - a culture that survived disaster and is working to rebuild
The Incendiaries - cultish, grassroots war efforts
The Book of Esther - medieval war practices, fighting armies
Beartown - begins at the end with such drama, shifts perspectives