Here is the blurb: "Mizuki is worried about her grandfather. He is clearly troubled by something, something that is draining life and laughter from him. Gently Mizuki encourages him to reveal a secret that he has kept to himself for many years, of a promise that he made and he was never able to keep. Might Mizuki be able to help, even after all this time?"
On the morning the atom bomb is dropped on Hiroshima seventeen year old Ichiro is at home with his friend Hiro. The young boys are having a day off from the factory where they are working making aeroplane parts. Hiro has just walked his little sister Keiko to kindergarten. Ichiro is reading a huge book - The Tale of Genji - which his father has gifted before going to war.
The bomb is dropped. The city is instantly destroyed. Hiro and Ichiro crawl out from the rubble and head through the horror determined to find little Keiko and to then get to the hospital. On the way Hiro dies. Ichiro does reach Keiko but he is unable to keep carrying her because he is so badly injured, so he tells her to wait near a building. He can see the hospital in the distance. He plans to get help and return.
"I peel the wet pages apart and carefully tear out the first page. ... 'My father ... told me there is magic in books.' I close the book, place the loose page on top and, with shaking hands, start to fold. ... When I am finished, I place the paper bird on her lap. 'A crane,' I say.' ... 'I will be back as soon as I can."
Ichiro has no idea this is a promise he can never fulfil. And as for the book, when Ichiro finally returns to the city, as a young man, he keeps folding the pages into nearly 1000 paper cranes leaving them all over the city in the hope Keiko is still alive.
Now jump forward to 2018 and Mizuki. Ichiro is her grandfather. She sits quietly while he tells this dreadful story of incomprehensible events and of his broken promise and broken heart. But she knows it is not true that there is nothing they can do. Mizuki can help her grandfather to heal. There is a place for that final paper crane to land seventy three years later.
I picked up this book and flicked through the pages. When I saw part of the story was written as a verse novel I knew this reading experience would be powerful - and I was right! This is a perfect book to share with a High School Class alongside the two picture books above along with The Miracle Tree by Chrisobel Mattingley.
Listen to an audio sample from page four on wards (told in verse). In this video Kerry Drewery reads a text extract from her book published in 2020.
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