Rating: 
Summary: Not at the level of 'Snow' but intriguing nonetheless
Review: Guterson's third novel is a departure from his first two, the very successful 'Snow Falling on Cedars' and 'East of the Mountains'. While also set in the Northwest, much of the similarities end there.'Our Lady' is set in the Olympic Peninsula, an area usually painted with mystical awe, but Guterson does not give the Peninsula the romantic, ethereal treatment received by the San Juan Islands and Eastern Washington, the settings for his first two books. Instead he paints a dreary picture of worn-out loggers, incessant rain and tiresome, threadbare characters that seem out of place and out of touch with the rest of civilization. Throw in a bit of an incredulous plot and Guterson has concocted a witch's brew of a story that put a heavy demand his writing talent. The story centers on Ann Holmes, a teenaged runaway who find her meager existence by picking mushrooms in the moss-covered floor of the Olympics. While rummaging in the forest, the rather simple and plain Ann sees a vision that she takes for the Virgin Mary. Thus the die is cast. Within 48 hours, people are hovering around Ann, following her as if she was a modern day Pied Piper. The ensuring scene would make P.T. Barnum proud. A couple of days later, the masses have swelled to a few thousand with an ancillary boom to the economy in the fictional town of Two Forks. Guterson peppers this main story with characters that are both directly and indirectly affected by Ann's vision. Tom Cross, an unemployed logger who now works as a guard at the local prison sees a chance to redeem his wretched life through Ann. He is the proverbial no-good, down-on-his-luck blue-collar straggler who can't seem to catch even a sliver of a break. Father Collins, the local priest whose stock has fallen into this desolate, backward corner of the world also sees some level of personal salvation in Ann's fate. It is difficult to assess the quality of Our Lady of the Forest. At times it is rambling as Guterson wanders from his prior simple and introspective prose. He becomes part lecturer, part ecclesiastical philosopher and strays from central themes. I almost put the book down after 100 pages as I became frustrated with his rambling and vacant style. However, Guterson makes a comeback and shows his talent. It would be very easy to write a book about Virgin Mary sightings in a biased and shrill manner. This doesn't happen. Guterson treats his characters with a tenderness and respect where many other novelists would heap scorn and ridicule on their behavior. While he does hold mild contempt for the followers of such an impressionable girl, he lets his reader sift through larger issues relatively independently. While I would rank his first two novels higher than Our Lady of the Forest, Guterson rallies in the end to at least give us a stimulating story.
Rating: 
Summary: Troubling, but beautiful...
Review: Was I the only reviewer who noticed that no one in the book-- not Ann's mother or grandfather, not the priest, not her "protector" Carolyn, not the thousands of vision-followers, not even the Virgin Mary saw Ann as a person but only as something to be consumed or used? Everyone is so self-absorbed that no one even sees Ann except the reader. Is this about Marianist vision or about the way modern American society treats its children? This was a fascinating book, but it broke my heart.
Rating:
Summary: Along with the Author...I lost interest
Review: Our Lady of the Forest runs in fits and starts. This story of young girl who is having visions in the primeval forests of the Pacific Northwest is initially compelling, but then gets more tangled and confusing as it goes along. This is a complicated feat because the novel does not concentrate on an extraordinary amount of characters or themes, yet somehow you find yourself losing your way. Anne, the "Joan of Arc" of the story, is a well drawn character who we are intensely interested in, despite Guterson's error of giving away most of Anne's tortured background right off. However, her friend, sceptic, and chief disciple is made out to be nothing more than a caricature of her own irony. There is no heart beating there, even though the author bestows her with heavy-handed secular motivations such as wanting to steal from the massive collections to fund her winter in the tropics. Indeed, all of the characters aside from Anne and Tom Cross, (an unemployed logger who is mean to the core, but obviously searching for healing,) are just mouthpieces to state religious and philosophical questions that anybody with even a freshman Introduction to Philosophy or Theology class already knows. Within the first few pages we get stuff from Aquinas, Pascal's wager, etc. However, the book doesn't go on to illuminate these ideas or fulfill their arguments. Rather, we get long digressions that ultimately prove frustrating, not in their content, but in their context. The community and the world in which Guterson has set his story is indeed fascinating, but perhaps the book is too short. I had a feeling that Guterson has too many things going on to be accomodated by the brief length. It seems as if the story ends too soon. The author conveys a deep passion for the area and some of the people, but unfortunately, not for the subject matter, and a result he loses not only his interest, but the readers as well. There is poetic brilliance and exposition in the prose, but the dialogue just seems so contrived and leaden, especially in the beginning sections. As a playwright, I am around dramatic texts all of the time and I am witness to the struggles and pains that playwrights take towards getting dialogue right, because, basically it is all you have. I think it would serve some novelists well to try and write a play or two. Guterson included.
Rating: 
Summary: A Disappointment
Review: I was delighted to find this book in my local library after enjoying Snow Falling on Cedars so very much a few years ago. Delight quickly turned to disappointment. Guterson's main characters are all obsessed with sex - Ann masterbates, she's been sexually abused in her past; Tom Cook thinks constantly about raunchy sex and imagines himself doing it with every woman he runs across; the priest masterbates and thinks about sex and the woman that "befriends" Ann (really uses her) is worried about men being attracted to her. I felt like Guterson was having some sort of mid life crisis, couldn't stop thinking about sex and had to write a book about it. It totally overwhelmed what could have been a very interesting and imaginative story. The ending was a disappointment as well - not what I had hoped or expected. I hope Mr. Guterson's got another good book in him somewhere - this sure isn't it.
Rating:
Summary: A Brave Departure!
Review: OUR LADY OF THE FOREST is a departure from SNOW FALLING ON CEDARS. Much as Bret Ellis did in AMERICAN PSYCHO, Guterson is sticking his neck way out here.
The plot is fairly simple. A young girl encounters The Blessed Virgin Mary in the woods while digging mushrooms. Before she knows it, she's got two thousand pilgrims breathing down her neck.
The trouble with this scenario is that Ann Holmes is a homeless person who's been known to smoke marijuana now and then and is also not averse to eating magical mushrooms. And she's not even Catholic! Guterson has fun making sport of Ann's devotees; much of the book is a satire on religious groupies whose gullibility is too much to believe.
The setting for OUR LADY OF THE FOREST is Washington state; Guterson adds a little environmental conflict in the person of Tom Cross, an out of work logger whose life is slowly swirling down the toilet. He feels responsible for his son's paralysis and he latches onto Ann of Oregon as his possible salvation.
Ann is a shy young girl and all of this hullabaloo is a little bit too much for her. That's where Carolyn Greer comes in. She takes on the role of Ann's spokesperson. She doesn't believe a word of this but she knows a goldmine when she sees one. She's a sort of Jimmy Buffett character who needs to earn money so she can winter in Mexico and some of the money meant for a Our Lady's new church sticks to her fingers.
The other main character is a first-year Catholic priest who lives in a trailer home; his church smells of mildew and he's thinking of leaving the priesthood. When he meets Ann, he's enticed by her Kate Moss, heroine-babe sexuality.
All of this is a whole lot of fun if you don't take religion too seriously and I guess that's the point Guterson is trying to make.
Rating:
Summary: Even the Virgin Mary was boring.....
Review: This is an interesting group of reviews--the book at least inspired intense feelings one way or the other in most readers.
I have no problem with dark books or dark characters. I also have no problem with unresolved issues at the end of a book. However, this book was not merely dark or mysterious, it was gratingly slow, meandering, and banal.
I agree with the readers who felt Guterson, based on the wonderful "Snow Falling on Cedars," turned out a rushed and problematic book. His themes are obvious, and his efforts to illustrate them a little too close to the surface. It was as if he took his book outline and hung a lot of descriptive phrases on each character, but never got to the depth of them. That's not to say that his descriptive passages are not occasionally brilliant--but the sum total was a lot of words about not much going on. It was a great disappointment--after pages and pages of wishing he would stop fooling around and return his story to Ann--to actually see inside one of her visions, and find the Virgin Mary saying the same old stuff she's always said in visions. I appreciate Guterson's point that faith is by nature indefinable, and its messengers often seemingly unsuited to the task, but his story would have carried much more impact had he forgone the excess and included the nuances that we love in his writing.
Rating:
Summary: An incomplete work
Review: After finishing the last pages of this novel, I sat with book in hand and wondered if there was any character in the novel with what I would call a genuine faith: the priest is riddled with doubt about his calling and his place in God's plan, the envoy from the bishop is a legalistic cynic who practically sneers at the possibility that God would communicate with mere mortals, and all the pilgrims who flock to the town are one-dimensional characters viewed only through the eyes of Carolyn, the "educated" agnostic. The novel raises important questions about the veracity or possibility of supernatural "communications" from God, and in the voices of its characters, provides a treatise of the many sides to this question. But because there is no true voice of faith, the argument is slanted from the beginning and this is the source of my greatest disatisfaction with this work. I agree with the reviewer who said that the novel seems unfinished. While it may be unfair to compare this book to Snow Falling on Cedars, it nonetheless stands that Guterson is capable of more courageous conjectures, more nuanced layering than he has explored in this work. He alludes, but leaves unexplored conections between the heroin-induced religious rantings of Ann's rapist and her later visions; he imbues Carolyn with the intellect to read and understand weighty tomes and dissertations, but does not accompany this with a thirst for truth, or the undying curiosity that often accompanies such an intellect. How does the priest come to terms with his vocation? Why is Carolyn still essentially the same person one year after such tumultuous events? What of the anger of Tom Cross?--its resolution is mentioned almost in passing, and yet it is a major theme in the first 99% of the novel. Partway through the book, I expected Guterson to be addressing issues such as "Does God speak to us today, and if in fact He does, how can we tell the true messenger from the charlatan?" and "What is the nature of faith? How do we know that we know?" and "Is it possible to walk in the darkness and yet live from a center of abiding certainty?" These were the questions he seemed to be raising. I was disappointed that he did not address them more fully or thoroughly, but instead just raised the questions, and then left them hanging, without adding anything to the discussion. Indeed, the characters seem to be shouting the questions without being interested in pursuing the answers.
Rating:
Summary: EXTRAORDINARY MARIAN READING
Review: An avid reader it took me awhile to grasp the breadth of David Guterson's writing. Inasmuch that the theme itself touched me with Marian sightings, it was really key individuals' struggle for meaning and forgiveness that kept me reading this book from binder to binder in two days. Which I seldom do. Today reading "Snow falling on cedars", the power of Guterson's symbolism and how well he captures 3-4 individuals' life, regrets and dreams from multiple perspectives - really direct and indirect witnesses to decisive events in the past - I can't wait for the next major works of this author.
Rating:
Summary: Not Likely
Review: Having lived in the Pacific Northwest a life time and in the church a life time, the main problem with this book is that it stretches belief. A Marian sighting in a Pacific Northwest logging town is surely possible, but it would generate a response of about ten people. Lots of good description of places and some of people. However, this isn't Rosswell, New Mexico people here in the Northwest aren't that gullable.
Rating:
Summary: Troubling, but beautiful...
Review: Was I the only reviewer who noticed that no one in the book-- not Ann's mother or grandfather, not the priest, not her "protector" Carolyn, not the thousands of vision-followers, not even the Virgin Mary saw Ann as a person but only as something to be consumed or used? Everyone is so self-absorbed that no one even sees Ann except the reader. Is this about Marianist vision or about the way modern American society treats its children? This was a fascinating book, but it broke my heart.
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