Cloud Atlas

⚖The case for it

Six stories, three centuries, six genres, and Mitchell writes each in a register that would pass as its own author: readers describe “6 different and believable realities in different times and locations.” Frobisher’s letters from Belgium are the section named most, a composer who is broke, brilliant and dishonest, and readers report “I fell in love with his selfish, cunning narrator.” Cavendish escaping a nursing home supplies the comedy. Zachry’s far-future Hawaii, told in a dialect built from scratch, is where readers who push through say the book keeps its soul. A comet-shaped birthmark recurs across all six lives, and the design pays out harder on a reread.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Adam Ewing’s sea journal opens the book in nineteenth-century journal-ese, and readers report quitting inside the first hundred pages, before Frobisher arrives to win them back. The 1970s conspiracy section is the one nobody defends, where “the constant twists and surprises suffer from ever more diminishing returns.” Critics say the “wobbly chapters show the seams of an awkward welding job,” and readers find “the connection between them tenuous, as much a gimmick as anything else,” six novellas sharing a jacket. Zachry’s invented pidgin runs longest and slows everything down. The book “gets caught up in its own perceived profundity” and lands “not nearly as smart as its author.”

— the honest librarian

11h

honest hours

16

sittings