Publisher: Simon Schuster Canada, September 28th 2021

Format: ebook

Pages: 640

Rating: 5/5 stars

Synopsis (from Goodreads):

Thirteen-year-old Anna, an orphan, lives inside the formidable walls of Constantinople in a house of women who make their living embroidering the robes of priests. Restless, insatiably curious, Anna learns to read, and in this ancient city, famous for its libraries, she finds a book, the story of Aethon, who longs to be turned into a bird so that he can fly to a utopian paradise in the sky. This she reads to her ailing sister as the walls of the only place she has known are bombarded in the great siege of Constantinople. Outside the walls is Omeir, a village boy, miles from home, conscripted with his beloved oxen into the invading army. His path and Anna’s will cross.

Five hundred years later, in a library in Idaho, octogenarian Zeno, who learned Greek as a prisoner of war, rehearses five children in a play adaptation of Aethon’s story, preserved against all odds through centuries. Tucked among the library shelves is a bomb, planted by a troubled, idealistic teenager, Seymour. This is another siege. And in a not-so-distant future, on the interstellar ship Argos, Konstance is alone in a vault, copying on scraps of sacking the story of Aethon, told to her by her father. She has never set foot on our planet.

My Review:

Thank you Simon and Schuster Canada for the copy of this book.
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Read if you like: multi-generation/multiple perspectives.
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Honestly, I wasn’t sure how I felt about the three different timelines that were so spaced apart in history, but I thought the author connected them well and I could not stop reading. We get to read about two characters around the time of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire, modern day US with an older man directing an ancient Greek play with young students, and then a young girl on a spaceship going to a new world.
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My favourite timeline was Anna in Constantinople and the spread of the Ottoman Empire. I thought she was a great character and I could not wait to get back to her perspective.
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It was fun to see how an ancient Greek book could connect across multiple generations.
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CW: war, death, physical abuse, cults, bombings, physical assault, sickness, death of a loved one.