Rating: 
Summary: Just plain awful!!!!
Review: I had high hopes for this book based on the critics' reviews. I now wonder if any of the critics even bothered to read the book. The prose is wordy and difficult to read. The characters are wooden, and I didn't care what happened to any of them. The author has a chance to really make a statement about the nature of prejudice shortly after WWII, but instead, backs off from the outcome of the trial and tacks on an inane ending to avoid having to deal with any actual issues. In addition, the author contradicts himself twice within a few pages. Both times, it is female characters who are shown to the reader to be liars. In the first instance, Hatsue remembers a kiss between her and Ishmael when they were ten, but tells her new husband that she has never been kissed before. Fine; I'm not sure anyone would consider a kiss at ten to qualify for a real kiss. However, in the next chapter, we find out that she met Ishmael in an old hollow tree all through high school ! and ended up doing a little more than kissing. In the other instance, the deceased's wife felt "resigned" with the other two men she had sex with in her life, but 2 pages later, remembers that she only dated two other men in her life and "insisted on their politeness and reserve." Apparently sex doesn't fall into either of those categories. Either the author can't remember what he wrote from one page to the next, or he believes that women are liars when it comes to their sexual history. The author also spends pages describing people and events which are never mentioned again, and which have absolutely no relation on the story. Cutting out these uninteresting and not-charming vignettes could easily have taken 100+ pages off the finished product. One assumes the author was paid by the page. In the end, I was hoping the storm would obliterate both the island and the book, so no one else will be reeled in and subjected to this awful excuse for literatu! re.
Rating:
Summary: Rent a video instead
Review: Absolute crap. I stuck with it out of a naive expectation that it could only get better. A triumph of marketing & packaging. A tragedy for those hours lost reading it. Nice cover...don't go there. If only the Amazon rating system endorsed the 'Big Raspberry'! I'm blowing a loud, wet one your way, DG.
Rating: 
Summary: Trying too hard
Review: I had high hopes for this book when I picked it up, and although I enjoyed it somewhat, I was in the end disappointed. The author seemed to be trying too hard to convey too many messages (but none effectively). He deals with prejudice, post-war societal wounds, forbidden love, and murder. It seems that all these things must fall into place with some sort of deep meaning, but they never do. If you pick it up, you'll probably finish reading it just to find out what happens in the murder trial, but that's really not enough to save this novel.
Rating: 
Summary: Outstanding - honest and literate
Review: My daughter gave this book to me for Christmas. It is perhaps the most memorable gift I have ever received. You see, I grew up on an island in the San Juans (Vashon) during the period covered by this book. We had neighbors, wonderful hardworking neighbors, whose misfortune it was to be of Japanese descent. They were prosperous farmers who lost virtually everything during this odious chapter in our history. Not only only is the picture painted of life on the islands at that time accurate but the story is told with consumate skill and sensitivity. You would have had to be there to understand and, perhaps fully appreciate, what the author has to say.
Rating:
Summary: Aweinspiring
Review: Damn you for beinging so good. At one time I felt I might be a good enough wordsmith to pound out something that people would enjoy. Not anymore. You are so good that I am embarrassed at my feeble attempts. (no spell check) I have been payed but now feel should return the money. Not enough stars to qualify for this writer. Don t listen to the nit-pickers. Damn you for being so good.
Rating:
Summary: A book dealing with unhealed wounds following World War II
Review: This is an excellent first book by the author. Set on an island in Puget Sound, it deals with a range of human conditions including prejudice, greed, jealousy and lust. The Japanese strawberry growers had peacefully coexisted with their neighors until December 1941. Then everyone's world was turned upside down. Japanese were driven into internment camps, property was seized, and young men of both white and Japanese descent went off to war. Now the war is over and people are rebuilding shattered lives when a fisherman from the community dies at sea. Was it an accident or murder? Fingers point at a Japanese fisherman involved in a dispute over land, and a pile of circumstantial evidence accumulates. The investigation exposes latent hostility towards the Japanese, and delves deeply into past events. The white newspaper editor, a childhood lover of the Japanese wife of the accused, is caught in a turmoil of emotions. Will he help the man who took the childhood sw! eatheart whom he still loves, or will he turn his back and walk away? The book deals with this and other moral and ethical issues. The novel was produced as a motion picture, and is probably available on video cassettes.
Rating:
Summary: Was he paid by the word???
Review: After reading so many reviews of this book, I could not believe it was the same book I was reading. I found myself skimming the pages for parts that were important to the plot! This book has more words than a old stale dictionary that had been left in the dusty desk of the school that was to be torn down when the snow is melted and the leaves on the trees have started to bud out like the breast of a teenage girl who tried to read this book!!!!!!!! I really tried to like this book more, being from the area. Maybe the movie will be better.
Rating:
Summary: A BLATANTLY EXHAUSTING BOOK
Review: ...The book's subject matter deals with one major issue: prejudice. Prejudice is such an easy yet widely abused topic because one can be sure that no matter how profane and juvenile their writing is, they will get some sort of critical praise if they attack the nature of hating another for non-exsistent reasons. It is so in Snow Falling on Cedars. The novel is so exhausting in its obvious efforts to make the reader irate and angry at the social injustices painted so crudely in the plot. You can almost witness Gutterson's mind at work, devising clever little traps and cruelties that are meant to hang on your heart-strings. He incorporates little vignettes on the side to appear like a puppet-master pulling the plot slowly inward. And lastly, he adds a Higgins Clark touch to the ending to give his lower-IQ readers an extra thrill. In short, Gutterson is a used car salesman eagerly pushing his trashy product into critics' faces. The reason this is so plainly obvious to people is because if Gutterson truly wanted to talk about prejudice, honestly wanted to portray it in some way, then he wouldn't strive to the lowest writing standards to do it. Instead, he would search for some insight, some knowledge and then realize that when he had none, he would need to search for a new plot. This book is loud, obnoxious, and stuck in a reality of wax figures living in a forgotten mural. It is not another writer we need in this world. We just need someone to at last get in touch with reality.
Rating: 
Summary: A book with airs.
Review: I had high hopes when I picked this book up. I was disappointed. The book tries too hard to deliver atmospheric scenes and "deep" moral dilemmas. I felt I was being hit over the head with the message, rather than being led to feel it through the natural course of events. The novel sets up a conflict between circumstances over which humans have no control (ex., the storm that rages throughout the book), and decisions that have profound effects on the lives of others. The primary challenge the jurists and island folk must wrestle with: can they put aside their prejudices against the Japanese after the War and give the convicted a fair trial? If the reader somehow fails to see this conflict and its importance throughout the book, the defence lawyer spells it out very bluntly in the last pages of the book. The book is not subtle. It describes people and scenes as though it is trying to win literary awards; nevertheless, the characters and scenes remained distant from me. It felt like I was reading a book written by one of the lawyers in the book's trial.
Rating:
Summary: Good Story with Rough Edges
Review: This is an entertaining book. The narrative vehicle--courtroom scene with flashbacks--is trite, but it works. Guterson is a gifted, yet unpolished writer. The book reads like a lawyer's first novel. Describing a court room attorney as "prescient" hardly creates a visual image. In contrast, Guterson buries the reader in heavy-handed snow metaphors. So too the thematic shifts based on place --the town vs. the sea vs. the strawberry fields vs. the woods --- are too often disjointed and contrived. Ironicallly, the book has been struck from some high school reading lists because of the sex scenes. Ironic because a high schooler skimming the novel for soft porn will be disappointed by Guterson's postively unerotic descriptions. This may be one of the few books that is better as a movie.
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