Movies are just like life, only more so

Reactions to the September selection of The Spokesman-Review Book Club were varied. But one reader was interested in the real story behind David Guterson’s novel.

“I read it,” wrote 76-year-old Dorothy Carter of Spokane. “It’s a good story, but for dramatic effect, he exaggerated any conflict between the Japanese and other islanders. I lived on Bainbridge Island from 1937-45. There was no bad feeling between the Japanese strawberry farmers and other islanders that I was aware of.”

Guterson, Carter wrote, “places the story at a different island, but it was Bainbridge, really. The first evacuation of the Japanese was from Bainbridge Island. It was a test to see if it could be done easily.”

And was it? Yes. And no. Says Carter, “I was standing on the dock, watching them march onto the ferry , carrying their suitcases, which was all they could take. All the kids from our high school were there watching, silently and with most of us crying. There went our schoolmates, the best-behaved, the best students and athletes. We felt it was the grave injustice that it was.”

By the way, the S-R Book Club’s October selection is “Bold Spirit: Helga Estby’s Forgotten Walk Across Victorian America” (University of Idaho Press, 300 pages, $16.95 paperback).