SOURCE: "Their Fellow Americans," in The New York Times Book Review, October 16, 1994, pp. 12-13.

[In the review below, Kenney praises Guterson's handling of Snow Falling on Cedars' complex narrative.]

In March 1942, just before the 800 Japanese residents of San Piedro Island in Puget Sound are herded off to a California internment camp, 18-year-old Hatsue Imada gives what seems a naïve response to her mother's description of the deep racial bias that has surfaced in their small, isolated community in the wake of Pearl Harbor: "They don't all hate us," Hatsue says. "You're exaggerating, mother—you know you are. They're not so different from us, you know. Some hate, others don't. It isn't all of them." Hatsue should know; for four years she has been carrying on a clandestine romance with a boy named Ishmael Chambers, son of the local newspaper editor, the two of them meeting at odd...