Joanne Harris’ novel Chocolat and Scott Hicks’ film Snow Falling on Cedars use characters and their interactions to explore the influence of the past on the present. Both texts reveal the influence of past relationships on their major female and...

“There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can…let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason” (Guterson 418). Reason, especially in the eyes and hands of human...

In David Guterson’s award-winning 1994 novel Snow Falling on Cedars, the story centers around the murder trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, using the testimony as a vehicle to tell a multigenerational story about the island’s fraught history from the...

David Guterson’s 1994 novel Snow Falling on Cedars spans three days detailing the murder trial of Japanese-American fisherman and family man Kabuo Miyamoto, all the while shifting in and out of real time to discuss the events leading up to it....