A haunting book, filled with imagery, it explores racism in the 1940's and 1950's. It tells of life on an island in Puget sound. After the death of a (white) fisherman and the arrest of another fisherman (Japanese American), the story unfolds through flashbacks to reveal intertwined lives, distinct cultures, and the bitter undercurrent of racism that divides neighbors. As the truth unfolds along with the story, I was tempted to read ahead - would the full truth be known before it was too late? Would they listen?

Excellent book! I would highly recommend it!! The movie is another story, though..wouldn't recommend that!! ( )

Unsäglich langweilig: Selten habe ich ein derart langatmiges Buch gelesen. Ausgehend von einem aktuell stattfindenden Mordprozess wird fast durchweg Vergangenes erzählt, das einem zwar die Protagonisten näher bringt, aber derart ab- und ausschweifend ist, dass man sich fast zwingen muß weiter zu lesen. Viele dieser in der Vergangenheit spielenden Handlungsstränge sind für den Fortgang der Erzählung absolut entbehrlich, das ist sehr ärgerlich.
Von der ziemlich haarsträubenden Auflöung des Falls am Ende ganz zu schweigen.
Dazu bemerkt der aufmerksame Leser immer wieder Formulierungen, die er in exakt gleichem Wortlaut schon einige Seiten zuvor gelesen hat. Das kann eigentlich nicht an schlechter Übersetzung liegen.

Es gibt so viel gute Bücher mit denen man seine Zeit angenehm verbringen kann - dieses gehört mitnichten dazu!

This is not an exciting, thrill-a-minute, real page-turner type of book. It is, in a word, interesting. I like both strawberries and winter, so I enjoyed much of the description. The characters, while realistically portrayed, did not evoke much sympathy in me, and while I generally understand why the reporter was given so much backstory, it did not really strike me as all that relevant. So if the post-WWII world of Japanese Americans in a remote island off the coast of Washington state interests you, you may like this book. If not, you would probably be bored to tears. ( )

I read sentences over and over. This is a wonderfully written book, the language sonorous, impressive in the range and depth of detail on everything that makes up life on an island off the coast of Washington. Having visited a similarly located island, Haida Gwaii (The Queen Charlotte Islands) off the west coast of Canada, I found the descriptions of landscape and the way of life especially riveting. I was also impressed with the vivid character sketches of a panorama of minor characters. Even walk-ons who barely have a word merit a name, first and last, something about appearance, ability, personality. The weaving of the courtroom drama and scenes from earlier in the lives of all the participants is done incredibly skillfully.

My only quibble with this book is at the end. I felt that it was winding up, with tense suspense, toward a sad end. I didn't want that ending, but it felt inevitable and right given everything that came before it. But toward the end, with rapid fire speed, a happy ending was pulled out of a hat, and for me it wasn't convincing and didn't have the power of the rest of the book. It brought forward for me where the book was not as strong as the rest. The love triangle never quite struck me as real.

But that aside, this book has so much beauty in its language, from landscape to character descriptions. The courtroom scenes are convincing. The structure amazing. The range of it marvelous: the way it captures a time, the fishing and strawberry farming, social structure, Japanese internment camp, one of the best war scenes I've ever read.

David Guterson's Snow Falling on Cedars is as riveting as its title implies. It contains lots of snow. It contains lots of cedar trees. It is filled with symbolism, rich descriptions of the natural world, gently explored themes and patiently rendered characters. As beautiful as an island snowfall is, however, no sane person would stand and watch one for hours on end – and this, it seems, is what Guterson expects his readers to do. With a measured style that borders dangerously on monotony, he insists upon his audience wading through page after page of detail and description, offering little in return for their efforts but the consistently high quality of his language. Any suspense or pace which might have accompanied this murder mystery are utterly drained. By halfway through the novel, the reader will have lost any desire to know who actually killed Carl Heine.

Perhaps if this book had been three hundred pages or less, it would have been acceptable. Stretched as they are, however, over four hundred densely-packed pages, the fruits of Guterson's labour are soured by a feeling of self-indulgence, and eventually wither from remaining too long on the vine. For four hundred pages, Guterson takes his reader for granted, and the result is a wholly unsatisfying epic; vivid enough, but easily forgettable.

As the reader tires, so do many of Guterson's ideas and techniques. His exploration of racism covers little ground not already trod by Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird. Even the character of Judge Lew Fielding seems to have been cloned (with a measure of unconvincing tweaking) from Lee's judge, John Taylor. The courtroom theatrics, while they may be the most readable parts of the book, are annoyingly incongruous; they would feel much more at home in a John Grisham novel than in Guterson's scrupulously realistic world. The final chapter, while preserving that realism, manages to be both insubstantial and anticlimactic, foregoing any real resolution in favour of a vaguely uplifting moral.

Who has time for Snow Falling on Cedars? Certainly not me, and probably not you, either. If there truly is a moral to this story, it is this: nothing ruins good writing like too much good writing. ( )

Listening to the unabridged version. Almost did not get through the first CD. Tedious courtroom dialog. But now, I'm hooked. It is the story that is compelling not so much the telling of it. That is annoying to me. I am incredibly sucked into the story and some of the characters, as in life. I want to be there. I feel I am there at times. I sit and listen in my garage letting the car battery keep it going. Not an easy read nor easy to listen to the telling but a must for the TBR pile. ( )

Paula

This is a lovely book. Unfortunately I had already seen the movie when I read it (the movie is quite good), but I think many of the visual images came from the movie instead of the book. In any case, the writing style is very well-matched to the story-- calming and almost surreal, floaty and dreamlike, symphonic. The plot itself is interesting enough, but what makes it stand out in the beautiful setting and the way the writing and place blend into each other. I hav enot read any other books by Guterson that I even liked-- this one is his masterpiece. ( )

Excellent writing and story. Loved it. ( )

a classic -- must read!!! ( )

I found this to be a really difficult book to read at times and very easy at others. I enjoyed the overall story, and I liked the plot transitions from current events to the past, but I found myself putting the book down at times because the flow from one chapter to the next was labor intensive. I would have liked more courtroom drama. ( )

A truly wonderful story. I absolutely loved it! ( )

I gave it 2-1/2 out of 4 stars in my rating system. It was well written. It was an easy read. However, the author did a poor job of convincing me that a person of Japanese heritage couldn't beat the rap. Racism was an undercurrent, but at no time did I view the characters in the book as overwhelmingly racist. Therefore, I was quite surpirsed at the end when the jurors were ready to convict based on ethnicity.

I posted this cranky review on Amazon years ago: This book is almost style-less. The characters are cardboard. The juxtaposition of the storm against the conflict in the courtroom is overwrought. It bludgeons one with its heavy-handedness. The guy can't write, and it's surprising that he admits that he spent 10 years on it. There's a bunch of people out there trying to hoist this on the public as serious literature. If this is the future of what "serious" American literature will be, we can look forward to a lot of amateurish attempts with politically-correct subject matter, and not much more. It's not surprising that Guterson's inspiration, Harper Lee, politely declined to be present when he received that Pen/Faulkner award, which will now have zero clout with thinking readers everywhere. This could make it to the little screen, I think, maybe as an after-school special about why prejudice is bad, or could be embellished and play as a Sunday night TV soap opera movie. By the way, some people have noted the seriousness of this book's tone; I had one out-loud laugh: the description of the reporter's lack of interest in hanging around at the pool hall, playing pool with the other guys. I can understand that; the guy lost his arm in the war. And I found his description of Mozart's Jupiter symphony as "melancholy" puzzling, since it is delivered with no irony. Was this his character's perception of the piece, or was this supposed to be descriptive? Only Guterson knows for sure. (The second movement is soft, but one could hardly describe its mood as "melancholy.") ( )

Good story of a young man in love with a Japanese American and how the family is sent to an internment camp. Includes a murder and a trial. ( )

This is a very richly written book. There are a lot of layers. On the surface it is a simple mystery - what actually happened to the drowned fisherman. On another level there is a whole exploration of the prejudice and cultural conflict. On top of that there is the presence of the impact of World War II - on those who fought, on an island made up of Caucasian and Japanese inhabitants, on a community. Then there are the more subtle things like the blizzard that covers the island during the trial, and the ocean that surrounds the island - both representing pieces of what's going on in the story. It's an enjoyable read because Mr. Guterson gives the reader so much to think about. There is a fair amount of sex - some of which seems critical to the plot and some of which not so much. ( )

A courtroom drama, sort of; the book's framing structure is a murder trial, taking place in a snowstorm on a fictional island off the Washington shore. It's slow, taking in the whole cast of the islanders, examining their predjuces and family ties and old love stories, and taking in especially the relationship between the natives and the Japanese immigrants during WW2 and afterwards.

So far, so good... but it's slow. It's full of description and evocative creation of a fictional historical world, but having given us this world, the author doesn't give us anything to happen in it. It perhaps ought to give us a feeling of wistfulness, a feeling of things left unresolved, and it does this, but not in a meaningful way; the reader is left hanging, not quite sure if the story is over, and if it is, what they ought to take away from it.

It's worth reading, and some of it is really beautiful - but it's not one I would recommend. ( )

A Japanese-American is put on trial for the murder of Carl Heine, a fellow fisherman whose body was found caught up in his own net. The Observer called it "a glorious whodunnit". They were, in fact, wrong. It was glorious, but not much of a whodunnit, either in structure or in tone. I'd say rather that it fell into that (almost) uniquely American genre of the courtroom drama. In this respect, and in the respect of the theme of a community divided by racial tensions, it was much like that court room drama par excellence To Kill a Mockingbird. However magnificent the latter, Harper Lee maintained that she had written for children, and indeed the perspective of children is an important feature of the book. Here, though, the young are noticeably lacking. The mistakes made in childhood and adolescence come back to plague the characters, but all involved have already fallen from grace.

Guterson's novel is peopled by complex, finely-drawn individuals who easily evoke sympathy, even in a world tainted by bitterness and prejudice. The geography of the Pacific island on which Japanese and Anglo-Americans struggle through the trials of the twentieth century is given over neither too much to metaphor nor to description but is so central to the story it even gives the novel its title. One feels a delicate touch similar to that of traditional Japanese art in the understated, measured prose. The solution, like most things in life, is devastatingly simple. The whole thing is haunting, but never demoralizing. An excellent novel. ( )

This book was well worth the anticipation I felt when I was waiting to read it. It had been on my TBR pile for awhile and I had forgotten all about it. It's a story that unravels through the case of a trial and the author brings you back to the past and then ties it back to the present time in the story. Although you're first brought in to the story under the impression that you find out whether a man was killed or not, you realize soon enough that the story is really about prejudice and injustice in America.

I had done a little research myself when I was back in high school but the focus was in Canada, not the States. It was basically about the injustices that were dealt to the Japanese Canadians during the World War II. The truth of the matter is that whenever someone brings up the case of prejudice and racism, most people directly think of Hitler, Nazis and the Jews. However, no one ever really brings up the North Americans and their own cases where they would go against its own citizens. The Japanese Canadians and Japanese Americans were treated like animals, enemies and "aliens", being sent away to internment camps. Although they were not murdered or gassed, it does not make the case any less serious.

This story is about how even in the name of justice and equality, humans can't help but add their emotions in. At the first hint of possible foul play, the law enforcers and citizens were already pointing their fingers at the Japanese Americans. Kabuo, the accused man, is seen as having the motive of hatred and prejudice when all along, it was hatred and prejudice that was being played against him. The narration is simply beautiful and captivating. Each character presents their case and brings you to see the underlying emotions of the people involved. The book has got my recommendation behind it. ( )

i'm still working on this one. so far i really like it. it's pretty slow moving, but it switches between past and present enough to keep it interesting. i decided to read this because someone asked if i had read it. i said no, to which they said, "Can you believe some people don't know that we used to have internment camps?" i said, "Gosh, no!" or something. I totally lied. i didn't have a clue. So now i'm reading the book. it feels unfair to judge the book because i really haven't had time to sit and read large chunks at once. so far, so good though.

Snow Falling on Cedars is a many faceted book. It is a story of forbidden teenage love. It’s a war story. It’s a murder mystery. But I think it is mostly a story about prejudice and community. The characters are well developed and believable. The relationships and interchanges are well explored. There are certainly dark undercurrents running through the book. But there is hope in the story as well. It’s not as much fun as what I usually read. But it really is good.

My complete review is on my blog, Nate's Library, specifically at: http://nates-library.blogspot.com/200... ( )

Ugh. What a snooze. Some descriptions were quite beautiful, but they weren't enough to make this an enjoyable read. Despite being very intrigued by the summary I had to struggle to get through this. The plot was too slow for me and the long-winded character descriptions were not always sufficiently relevant to be interesting. ( )

I read this book a couple years, I remember enjoying it tremendously. It is kinda hard to get through, but the details in the descriptions are amazing. ( )

This is a very fine Detective Novel.Well worth the Read. ( )