Audiobook. 5 stars. Narration by Davis Guterson, 4.5 stars.

Outstanding: tragic and beautiful. I'm so glad I found this book.

I have a book hangover now, so much to think about.

I enjoyed this random selection from a used book store.

It's basically a Whodunnit, cleverly crafted with the back stories of the various characters interwoven throughout the narrative. An American fisherman is found dead, a local Japanese man is on trial for his murder. The trial press exposes the simmering racial tensions dating back to the war.

A Japanese girl and her American childhood best friend experience testing times as they come of age. Separated by war and race, what will become of their dreams?

This novel is slow and focuses a lot on the breath-taking scenery and descriptions. It's not exciting or thrilling but more of a period drama. There are a fair number of graphic sex scenes and some very offensive language especially in the scenes relating to the war. It's a shame as the story is worth reading.

definitely not me going to my local library and buying any of the books they have for sale (for like $1 at the most) that sound remotely interesting or have a nice cover just simply because i wanna add to my overflowing bookshelf because for some reason i enjoy collecting random books more than reading them even tho i already have a lot that need to be read and i’m drowning in my tbr and my bookshelf literally has no more space on it and buying more books is really not the best plan to solve any of these problems but hey yoLo !1!!!

Not sure why I have never read this before but I really enjoyed it anyway. Usually I am not a fan of court room dramas but the way this one alternated the court room scenes with background information and scenes from the past was wonderful. The representation of the Japanese people was a little stereotypical - no, a lot stereotypical - but it did not spoil the fascinating story. I was interested too to hear about this chapter in the history of the war. I knew about the way anyone with any German heritage was rounded up in England, but I did not know about the Japanese in America. It was a very low point for humanity around the world. This is a good book anyway and worth reading for anyone who has not already done so!

The island of San Piedro ,1954

A fisherman's body is found apparently murdered.
Kabuo Miyamoto, an American Japanese is charged , and a trial is conducted during a fierce blizzard.

As the trial progresses, we are exposed to the open wounds related to the Japanese American community before,during and following the second world war:

The exile and encampment of the Japanese Americans during the war.

The open wounds that still exist in the minds of the war veterans.

Prejudice, racism and simple fear of people who are different.

Life and hardships in a small community where everyone knows everyone.

The book combines various naratives:
Historical fiction /Drama.
Love story.
Legal thriller.

I enjoyed the book, I enjoyed the slow pace and the deep description of the nature, fishing and human relationships. The characters are well developed and enrichen the plot with life and substance.

The story itself, while being interesting, is a bit lame and not very reliable, but still entertaining.

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, is based on remote San Pedro Island (fictional) in Puget Sound, Washington State. Kabuyo Miyamoto, an American-Japanese man is accused of murdering a fellow salmon fisherman whose body is found mysteriously tangled up in his fishing net. San Pedro Island is a very small community, everyone knows each other – Salmon fishing is a major industry as is farming crops such as strawberries (yum).

There is a substantial Japanese community on the island and during WWII this group of people were subject to unpleasant treatment by the locals and even worse, discrimination, racism and suspicion of corroboratring with the enemy from both local folk and the US Government. Xenophobic sentiment is bubbling over, this had been distilling for decades. The plight of the Japanese-Americans was a significant take away for me after reading this book – I didn’t realise how poorly these people were treated during and after WWII. Many had even fought for the US Army after the attack on Pearl Harbour for heaven’s sake!



This book started off as would any other courtroom drama – so I strapped myself in, as I was well in the mood for such a story. Well, after only a few pages along comes our first flashback – this annoyed me a bit, then another and some flashbacks even had their very own flashback, within a flashback – yes, they came thick and fast.

This, when all I wanted was a good courtroom scrap.

Of course, Guterson was using this device to provide the reader with an in-depth perspective of the community and the people in it. Once I got over my hissy-fit and stopped stomping all over the house, huffing and puffing - I sat down, grew a pair, and really, really enjoyed it. In fact, I loved it.

There’s a whole lotta ‘small village’ crime stuff here, there’s the victim, the alleged murderer, their wives/husbands, kids, relationships, sad stories of loneliness, small town politics, WWII, nasty skulduggery and more.

In fact, Guterson force fed this witless reader, who thought he was starting a mere crime/courtroom drama with an in-depth tale of people and relationships in a rural community. These 460 pages have a lot in them, but Guterson writes them with lubricated ease – it’s even gentle, as the name suggests.

One last thing, I would imagine this part of the world – North West USA & South East Canada has have some of the most beautiful scenery in the World, I’d love to go!!

A very solid 4 Stars

Kevin Ansbro, author of Kinnara, reminded me of this book...( having just read "The Translation in Love".
Although both stories are different...the history is heartwrenching of how the American - and Canadian- Japanese were treated during and post WWII.

I just saw that the author has a new book of 'short stories' coming out. "Snow Falling on Cedars" was a beautiful book. I must have read it before I was a Goodreads member -- (I still remember his 'writing'). Always did want to read another book by this author!

It's My Cousin Vinny meets Stephen King's It meets Chasing Amy (or 1000 Days of Summer.) Like My Cousin Vinny, the backdrop is a trial with quirky characters, a defendant that's been railroaded by cultural prejudice and some wildly coincidental evidentiary twists and turns. In this case, the defendant is a Japanese-American fisherman named Kabuo living in post-WWII Washington State. So while he's a native to the area, he's as much an outsider as Vinny's Yankee cousins are in the deep south.

But, much like Steven King's It, this is the story of a community rotting from the inside. But while a malevolent clown pulled the strings of hate and fear in small town Maine, it's the legacy of war that fuels small-town Washington's prejudice.

But while this novel is full of thoughtfully drawn characters and gripping description of war, internment camps and small-town life, it falls into a thematic trap I more closely associate with naively intellectual romantic comedies. The novel's main character, Ishmael, is a white, straight, intellectual, upper-middle class, sensitive man in his thirties (WSIUSMT) who is in love with the defendant's wife, Hatsue. His sense of justice tells him to help reach an acquittal, but Hatsue is his childhood sweetheart and he still loves her so, so maybe, just maybe, if her husband were to go to prison, he could have her back.

That the story focuses more on a WSIUSMT (perhaps the most well-fed of all modern archetypes) in a book about subtle prejudice and the Japanese-American experience is a minor annoyance. There are a host of well-drawn characters here so a little patriarchal idealism doesn't poison the well. The problem is that the central conflict turns around whether the WSIUSMT will do the obviously right thing. This triggered a similar reaction in me as when I watched 1000 Days of Summer (or Chasing Amy) where I found myself audibly reacting; 'Just get over yourself dude! Movie solved!' as the otherwise likable WSIUSMT grumbles and pouts.

n  "None of those other things makes a difference. Love is the strongest thing in the world, you know. Nothing can touch it. Nothing comes close. If we love each other we're safe from it all. Love is the biggest thing there is." n

I believe that this suspenseful novel would also appeal to fans of To Kill a Mockingbird.

Na een mistige nacht wordt de vissersboot van Carl Heine Jr. stuurloos op zee gevonden. Bij nader onderzoek wordt zijn lichaam gevonden in zijn netten onder water. Wat is er gebeurd? Een ongeluk....of moord?

Niet lang daarna wordt Kabuo Miyamoto beschuldigd van moord op Carl. In zijn boot worden sporen gevonden die daarvan het bewijs zouden kunnen zijn.

Het proces begint. Dat is eigenlijk de kern van het verhaal. De locatie van het het verhaal: het eiland San Piedro.

De auteur laat ons kennis maken met vele eilandbewoners. Eigenlijk kent bijna iedereen iedereen daar, en velen hebben met elkaar te maken.
Er woont ook een aantal Japanezen op het eiland. In 1942, na Pearl Harbor, zijn ze allemaal weggevoerd, omwille van hun ras, dat op dat moment als 'de vijand' beschouwd werd. Dit veranderde heel veel in het leven van de mensen van San Piedro.

Hatsue, de vrouw van Kabuo, speelt ook een grote rol in het verhaal. In haar jeugd had zij namelijk een geheime relatie met Ishmael Chambers, die eindigde toen Hatsue en haar familie van het eiland verdreven werden. En Hatsue trouwde met Kabuo.

Nog veel meer wordt er verteld over verschillende mensen en hun levens voor en na de oorlog. En er ontstaan situaties die het zouden kunnen verklaren dat Miyamoto en Heine zich als vijanden tegenover elkaar zouden kunnen gedragen.

Heel veel 'zou' dus echter....

Ik vond de verhalen over de mensen interessant en boeiend, en op het einde van het boek, als het proces goed op gang kwam, werd het dan ook nog eens spannend.
Ik heb dit boek graag gelezen.

This book was so hauntingly good, it made me want to read more novels by men.
I've toured the Pacific Northwest West many times and I've seen evidence of a hidden history around Japanese internment camps and injustice and I wanted to learn more. I am so sad for how Japanese Canadian/ American people were treated and continue to be treated. On Salt Spring Island I saw many stores and places named after a "Mowat" so I looked him up. I discovered that the many pioneer Japanese families who were forcibly removed from their homes during WW2 came back to the island years later with nothing...a man named Mowat had sold all their land and profited greatly while they in the camps. This book has made the details of those days come alive and shatter my heart.

*I can't help but note however, that the online jokes about how poorly men write women are all true in this book, even to the point of comedy. I couldn't tell you much about the women in this story except what their lips, neck, and breasts were doing at all times.

This book is pretty far outside my normal reading, so please keep that in mind as you check out this review.
That said, Good god, this book is long. The book centers on a murder trial, but it also uses flashbacks to give background on the story and the various characters. It’s a lot like the first season of Lost, actually, with flashbacks comprising the bulk of the story. The problem, also like Lost, is that you’re really most interested in what’s happening now as opposed to what’s happened already.
A good example is near the ending. I won’t spoil anything here, but all you need to know is that it is on the eve of the verdict, the event the whole book is hinging on. You’ve read 400 pages leading up to this point, and the author makes one final digression to talk about another character in such exhaustive detail as to list the books on his bookshelf. Seriously. We’ve already heard quite a bit about this character, and I understand the utility of objects as clues to personality, but I do not need a list of every book the dude read. It’s kind of lazy in a weird way because it’s lazy while at the same time being a whole lot of work.
To continue the comparison to Lost, it also felt like a whole lot happened at the beginning and the end, but not so much in the middle.
Anyway, that’s just one example of what happens in the book pretty often. You have a good plot and interesting characters, but they get a little bogged down in the details. The author was trying to paint a very vivid picture using lots and lots of small details, but in cataloguing the details you really miss out on appreciating the painting as a whole. The story was very decompressed, but it was the least important details which were decompressed.
Finally, there is some good writing in here, but if you don’t know shit about sailing or the environment of the Pacific Northwest, you are SOL. The names of plants come up a lot more than their description, and if the smell of cedar isn’t the sort of detail you can call up, don’t expect a lot of help.