Snow Falling on Cedars Review (QTR 1 SSR)

Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson takes place nine years after WWII, 1954, in San Piedro. As much as the book is fiction, there are a lot of topics such as racism against the Japanese after the war. The genre is a historical novel. San Piedro is actually fake, but in the beginning of the book there is real-looking map that positions the island in the Washington peninsula (right by Canada), so I actually didn't realize the fake setting until chapter nine. The book is about a trial of a man named Kabuo who is being charged with murder against Carl Heine. Kabuo is Japanese and Carl is a white WWII veteran, but they are both fisherman and grew up together. Carl is a very dynamic character as he did not have any trouble with Kabuo before the war, has trouble with prejudice after the war, but then Kabuo proves him wrong.  Kabuo is a flat character described as a statue with cold blood who has always been prejudiced by white folk on San Piedro because of his Japanese heritage and this leads up to the climax when Kabuo and his family are virtually left homeless. He is ultimately saved by a reporter named Ishmael. Ishmael is the other of the two dynamic characters in the story because he has to deal with his past romance with Hatsue (Kabuo's wife who rejected him) and Ishmael then makes a last-minute decision to save Kabuo.

I think the author did a great job of giving specific details throughout the plot, in fact, he perfectly describes a relation of manhood and womanhood between Kabuo and Hatsue. However, the book was a little long for not very much of action: 460 pages divided into 32 chapters. There was a bunch of flashbacks and it kind of got boring because it would keep going back to events that had happened and, again, to the trial itself. Overall though, I guess the fact that kept my eyes glued to the book was the fact that I couldn't predict whether the ending was going to be happy, or sad, or just boring like the trial flashbacks.