The Overlooked First Novel

Yesterday’s NEW YORK TIMES carried an article in their “Dining” section about Shave Ice, which Florence Fabricant, the author, describes as “popular in Hawaii and Japan as well as other parts of Asia”. Funny. That’s exactly what we called it in Jamaica when I was a child, first that, and then later, 'sno cone.' The ‘sno’ part came about, I guess, as a result of increasingly popular and pervasive Hollywood movies in which we saw snow, and the ‘cone’ part because the shave ice vendors moved to serving it in paper cones.