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Rating: 
Summary: Very unique!
Review: I cannot explain the story better than the Editorial Review on Amazon[.com], they explained the story very well. What I can tell you is that this wonderful little book can be read in less than an hour and that it is gentle, quiet, airy, romantic, graceful and a book that I will read again on some snowy afternoon.
Rating:
Summary: Very unique!
Review: I cannot explain the story better than the Editorial Review on Amazon[.com], they explained the story very well. What I can tell you is that this wonderful little book can be read in less than an hour and that it is gentle, quiet, airy, romantic, graceful and a book that I will read again on some snowy afternoon.
Rating:
Summary: Snow
Review: I have never read a more beautiful book. I could change not one word.
Rating: 
Summary: INTERNATIONAL SENSATION
Review: Just because a book comes from another country and had glowing reviews on the back with titles like La Repubblica or Culturas (I guess those are literary reviews or magazines), it still doesn't mean it will succeed in America. This hastily constructed short ditty has pretensions of touching our inner heartstrings. It wants us to surrender to the love and the quirky characters (I am so tired of quirky characters like the tight rope walker in this novel who ties a rope between the two highest peaks in Japan. All these weird and strange characters in fiction these days makes me feel like I'm in a freak show.)Ok, in this book, which begins in April 1884 in Japan, the seventeen year old Yuko Akita has two passions: writing haiku and snow. When forced to choose between being a priest or a soldier, he decides he wants to write haiku. On top of that, he wants to write haiku about snow. That's it. In a wrongheaded turn of the book, Yuko says that he likes white because it is pure and has no color. We know that all the colors are in white. The Emperor hears about his haiku and requests him at court but Yuko does not believe he is ready yet.He is sent to a master artist named Soseki to learn how to put color in his haiku. Along the way he will fall in love with unattainable beauty and learn how tight rope walking fits into life. I felt like I was supposed to be "charmed" by this book. Like I was supposed to get some profound truth out of it. I didn't get that. I felt like this book was tripe. It started off well, and felt like the rhythm of haiku but then about half way through I just wasn't accepting the world portrayed in the book anymore. It was cliched. Especially the whole tight-rope walking as a metaphor for living life deal. The book was OK. It does bother me that there are good books being written and are in search of a publisher even as you read this review, but this book was published instead. Originally in France. For a charming piece of French art, watch the movie Amelie. Now THAT is a great work of charm. Go bury this book under a glacier with a mastadon somewhere in Siberia. It did have sentences of beauty, here and there, but not enough. I think when plot came in, the book went out. It should have been written as simple poetic meditation.
Rating: 
Summary: The beauty of a snowflake
Review: Yuko Akita, seventeen and living in the south of Japan in 1884, is nearing the end of his boyhood. It's time for him to choose a vocation. Warrior or monk. He chooses to be a poet. Says his father, "Poetry is not a profession. It is a way of passing the time. Poems are like water. Like this river," and Yuko says, "That is just what I want to do. To learn to watch the passing of time." Each if Yuko's poems is pure and colorless, each one is about snow. The Emperor's Imperial Poet is not satisfied. They are too white for him. So he sends Yuko to study color with Soseki, a blind old artist who was once in love with a tightrope walker ... named Snow. As the book jacket states, SNOW reads like a long, intensely lucid poem. Not one word is wasted. Although the story itself is not all that remarkable and won't surprise the aware reader, the method used to tell it sets it apart from the ordinary. By the end I had tears in my eyes. There is even a touch of humor here, along with some profound statements about both life and art. Only 100 tiny pages long and readable in half an hour, SNOW is a remarkably beautiful, if simplistic, love story that I can highly recommend.
Rating:
Summary: The beauty of a snowflake
Review: Yuko Akita, seventeen and living in the south of Japan in 1884, is nearing the end of his boyhood. It's time for him to choose a vocation. Warrior or monk. He chooses to be a poet. Says his father, "Poetry is not a profession. It is a way of passing the time. Poems are like water. Like this river," and Yuko says, "That is just what I want to do. To learn to watch the passing of time." Each if Yuko's poems is pure and colorless, each one is about snow. The Emperor's Imperial Poet is not satisfied. They are too white for him. So he sends Yuko to study color with Soseki, a blind old artist who was once in love with a tightrope walker ... named Snow. As the book jacket states, SNOW reads like a long, intensely lucid poem. Not one word is wasted. Although the story itself is not all that remarkable and won't surprise the aware reader, the method used to tell it sets it apart from the ordinary. By the end I had tears in my eyes. There is even a touch of humor here, along with some profound statements about both life and art. Only 100 tiny pages long and readable in half an hour, SNOW is a remarkably beautiful, if simplistic, love story that I can highly recommend.
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