A most astonishing book which, I think, could easily mean different things to different readers: a love story, an antiwar novel, a book about prejudice; and all of these things to some readers.

Extremely boring. The characters are dull, the plot is dull, everything about the book is dull. There is essentially only one important thing per few chapters and the rest is just unnecessary descriptions. It made me constantly look at the page number to see how much i had left to read. The ending is also disappointing and I wouldn’t say it’s worth reading at all.

This was good... ish, until it wasn't. The writing was strong, but it's bloated with too much description of things that don't matter and there's a weird stream of sexism in both the overwrought descriptions (I sure learned a lot about the male characters' wives hair and breasts) and the "main" character is basically an incel who uses romantic rejection to justify his racism and unethical decisions. I'd love to hear this story written by a person of Japanese-American descent because there are some strong historical lessons here, but Guterson doesn't quite get there (especially under his '90s lens).