Mr. Doerr has produced a simply written, but structurally complex novel with five protagonists who live in different times and places. All of the protagonists are marginalized somehow as children (e.g. deformity, homosexuality, hypersensitivity…). We follow them through time. Some will eventually interact (shades of All the Light We Cannot See), but all are linked by an ancient Greek story that the author has imagined (shades of Station Eleven). The events in the Greek story are echoed in the lives of the protagonists in the novel, and, I think, at least one message in the ancient story, that there’s no place like home, is echoed in the novel as a whole. Some of the philosophical notes seem platitudes, All times and all stories being one and the same in the end. or That’s what the gods do, they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come., but I found the novel quite satisfying and maybe even uplifting despite its confrontation with the approaching end of days.