Cloud Cuckoo Land

I can do nothing but gush about this love letter to stories and books. I have read reviews picking apart the ambition and the cost of the ambition with supposed lost tension. I have read the reviews that there is too much ham-fisted foisting of the underlying message of the importance of stories, and libraries and reading, etc. I have read the detractors who have determined Cloud Cuckoo Land too sweeping and too self-involved and therefore, too dismissive of the narratives that should have greater impact, like the breadth of the historically significant battle rattling the days of Omeir and Anna. I disagree.
Doerr's characters are vivid and their realities shape the story and isn't that the whole point in the first place?
All of the stories and timelines worked for me and I wasn't frustrated to leave one over another and came to be invested in them all, in nearly equal parts - which is truly saying something.
In my mind, it is a greater work than his Pulitzer-winning novel, All the Light We Cannot See, because it treads previously untended ground and uses imagination to reveal all the greater good of humanity, or the greater good that could be, even through the sadness and tumult and struggle that plagues all life. I loved it.