sweet-indigo's Full Review: David Guterson - Snow Falling on Cedars
I opened this book on the bus one day. I had to read it for Literature, you see, so I wanted to make a head start. And it was amazing! I was plunged into a completely foreign world. I am English, town-dwelling, middle class, mainlander, and this book helped open a whole new world for me.
Some might argue that Guterson adds excessive trivial detail to this book, but I felt it added infinitely to the feel of the story. Characters are not flat and impersonal in this book, and a few pages is enough to turn you into a native San Piedran.
The plot is a mixture - essentially a courtroom drama that gradually evolves in the reader's mind to a dark yet moving history of the Second World War and the Japanese Internment, as well as the romance the movie was so ardently advertised as. This is not a book to go to if you want an intricate murder mystery, but if you want depth of character and the full vividness of human emotion, dive right in. The characters are diverse, and you will be pulled along with them through the good times and the bad. Guterson does not take half-measures; his characters are reliving the terror of the war and the haunting knowledge of their own actions where others would be fretting at being stood up for a date.
The only problem is it does grind after a while. Just as you're about to find out the secret of the whole thing, it's yet another flashback, and it almost becomes tempting to skip a few pages to get onto the good stuff again. This is really the only problem with all the detail - sometimes, instead of helping it, it hinders the plot; you get the feeling that an attempt to enhance the color became a vast inundation of paint onto the novel. Ishmael's and Kabuo's plot run side by side, and in my Literature class, I had the feeling that we were either rooting for one plot or the other. It benefits from a second read because that balances the two main plots out.
Winner of the PEN/Faulkner AwardAmerican Booksellers Association Book of the Year AwardSan Piedro Island, north of Puget Sound, is a place so isolated...More at HotBookSale
On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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