I really enjoyed this book. Although fiction, it reveals one of those little known sagas of history - a WWII campaign of Japanese balloons with explosives that landed in various places (mostly Alaska).

Impressive organization of the chapters. David is a truly prolific writer. However, when I reached the middle of the book, I just couldn't wait to finish reading this one and start reading other.

This is a very strange book in my opinion. It reads like a one way conversation between the author and reader and, of course, the reader has no voice. It is written in the first person and the person is a WWII vet who is now a priest and he tells rather abstract stories about his life and that of his sometimes friend who is a Native American Shaman. It reminded me of my lifelong mantra, "Life is too short to read bad books." I put it down after 50 pages.

I may have been the only person to have found this book NOT while looking for Mitchell's Cloud Atlas. I like to read about Alaska and this was a fascinating period of time. Someone likened the story to a drifting balloon, and so it is. Combined with a great spy story.

While it had a slow start, the book gains depth and insight as it goes along. It provides some truly remarkable characters (Gurley for instance) and opens an unusual and fascinating window into the war games being played out in the US during WWII. It left me with a lot of food for thought. The ending (which was the beginning, actually) was unexpected. Lots of disparate ends did all come together in very well told story.

Blech. Resembles the movie in almost no ways.

Enjoyable book, especially for someone unacquainted with this piece of WWII history. Callanan does a good job of keeping the pace up making this a fun read.

My main complaint would be how Belk's character change is communicated. Callanan attempts a "stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back" sort of thing that is mostly communicated by Belk saying things like "Yeah, i started to do bad stuff", punctuated every now and then with an example from the plot, which wasn't very compelling for me as a reader. Additionally, at times the characters can seem more like caricatures rather than real people, which i don't think is the intent.

Still, I'm mostly satisfied with the experience. Would recommend.

This story is set in Alaska during WWII. It is about the relationships between
a serviceman, a priest and a prostitute . It does shed light on an unknown topic to me, hot air balloon bombs. But all in all, I found this book dull, slow and not to my liking .

This debut book by Liam Callahan is written confidently and masterfully.

The name is apt, as the story does at times feel encased in a layer of semi-transparent clouds, now realistic and now, dealing with things which are not quite here or there.. There is a sense of unreality, familiar both in the way we all learn our way through life, especially when confronted with things absolutely out of scope of our previous experience, and in the way, sometimes, during the night one can't help feeling strange presences in the next room during the night, and tries to explain them away with logical reasons.

Sometimes, to keep your sanity, you need to embrace the strange and unfamiliar.

Where speaking about certain writers, you would describe their style as magic realism - usually iin these cases you would mean writers of Latin American descent, but here, is a sample of an Alaskan magical realism.

Amazon synopsis:
"Set against the magnificent backdrop of Alaska in the waning days of World War II, The Cloud Atlas is an enthralling debut novel, a story of adventure and awakening—and of a young soldier who came to Alaska on an extraordinary, top-secret mission…and found a world that would haunt him forever.

Drifting through the night, whisper-quiet, they were the most sublime manifestations of a desperate enemy: Japanese balloon bombs. Made of rice paper, at once ingenious and deadly, they sailed thousands of miles across the Pacific...and once they started landing, the U.S. scrambled teams to find and defuse them, and then keep them secret from an already anxious public. Eighteen-year-old Louis Belk was one of those men. Dispatched to the Alaskan frontier, young Sergeant Belk was better trained in bomb disposal than in keeping secrets. And the mysteries surrounding his mission only increased when he met his superior officer—a brutal veteran OSS spy hunter who knew all too well what the balloons could do—and Lily, a Yup’ik Eskimo woman who claimed she could see the future."


By the way, the backbone of the book - the story of the japanese ballon bombs is true, and that is also quite amazing.

I think I have some quotes earmarked in the book, but as my ereader is at home, and I am in the mood to write this short review - I will, maybe, post the quotes later.

IWTBITIW - (see paragraph three)

This is an interesting and haunting book, one that is likely to stay with you over the years. I found the structure odd at first, but persevered, and by the end had it comfortably worked out. The historical points and the geographic locale make it an interesting read.

I doubt that I would have picked up this book. I like so many others thought is was the other "Cloud" book. However I am glad I did.

Maybe we should have an acronym for the onset of a review - such as IWTBITIW (It Wasn't The Book I Thought It Was) and skip the tales of woe about the book not being the "right" book. My excuse was , I ordered it verbally from my library and the librarian selected the wrong one.

This novel is set in Alaska during the last year or so of WWII. The narrator Sgt. Belk works with a demolition crew that disarms Japanese bombs floated across the ocean via hot air balloons. His superior officer Gurley and a young YuPik woman Lily are the other main characters. Belk now a priest, 50 years later, is at the bedside of Ronnie who is dying. Belk tells him the story of the three going after a balloon with Young kid in it. Lily is also looking for her long missing Japanese lover who drew the maps, hence the cloud atlas. Well written. The best parts dealt with the balloon bombs.

Abandoned. Just too annoying