Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award

Transcription

I chose the book Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson. It was first published in 1994 and I read it at that time. It became the 1995 Book of the Year by the National Booksellers Association and it also won the Pen/Faulkner Award. And I chose it for several reasons. One, when I read it I thought it was just great. It was an excellent book. It takes place in the Pacific Northwest and I had lived there for several years so I was interested in that location. And it talks about a small community in Washington that was ripped apart by racism when the Japanese population was moved into internment camps in 1942. The final reason that I chose it was that I was stunned when I learned that I had been challenged as having sexually explicit information and profanity and it was inappropriate for high school students. At that time I had a high school student and a middle school student, my children were at those ages, and I would have been proud for them to have this as part of their curriculum. The actual story documents a trial, a murder trial, that goes on in the 1950s, but each witness has – flashback is then used to create a complex historical content for each of the witnesses as part of the story line. So it is just very well crafted, very well written. In checking for passages in the book that could be considered for challenge I came across one passage that describes the day that the Japanese population was removed from their homes, removed from everything they knew, put on a boat and sent to a desert in California and put in internment camps. Those passages are not part of any challenges that had been put forward so I looked further and came across a passage that describes the wedding night of Kabuo, the one who is charged with murder, and his wife Hatsue. So they’re in an internment camp, no freedoms whatsoever, and they decide to get married. And this passage describes their wedding night in such a beautifully delicate way. They’re in a small room with people all around. The mother has put up sheets around a potbellied stove trying to give them privacy. It is so delicately beautiful. So, you can say that on page 92 the word penis and scrotum are used. But to do so removes the context, the story line, the beauty of the writing of this book. I am Sue Samson, Humanities Librarian, at the Mansfield Library, at The University of Montana, and I read banned books.