Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes

Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Eleanor Coerr is a true story about a young girl named Sadako who lived in Hiroshima all her life. The girl is eleven years old in the story in a town that was bombed by American nine years earlier. Many of the people in the town have been dying from the bomb disease called leukemia. This girl is a very energetic and vibrant young girl who wants to the be the fastest runner in all the school. On the day of her school track and school meet the young girl wins the race but feels very weird and dizzy afterwards. Sadako continues to run and improve her speed so she can make the junior high track team but the dizziness won't go away. One day she is running and faints. She is rushed to the hospital to find out that she has the bomb disease. Her and her family are mortified and they come visit her in the hospital every day. Her friends comes one day with a gold piece of paper and folds it into a crane for her. She tells Sadako that she heard if a sick person folds 1,000 cranes they will live a long and healthy life. Sadako sets out to fold her 1,000 cranes. *Spoiler Alert* Since the back of the book gives away what happens I feel it is okay to tell you that she dies before she is able to fold all the cranes. This story is now told to many children in Japan and her story is told throughout the country. There is a monument in the Hiroshima Peace Park dedicated to her and her paper cranes.
    This was a very sad book. I read it because I wanted to know more about the past of Hiroshima and how people there were affected by the atom bomb. It was a very informative and interesting book and I would recommend it to my peers to read. I would also have it in my classroom library for children to read and get some history on different parts of the world but I would caution them before they read it.
    This book is suitable for fifth grade and up. I wouldn't recommend it to younger children because I think some of the content may be too advanced for them. Students of either gender would be interested in this book because it is a gender neutral book. I would use this book as a read aloud in a fifth grade classroom (after I had warned all my students and gotten their approval to do so) because I think it is a great way to talk about history and courageous young people. I think it would be a great way to explain the paper cranes that we see all over stores now and give students a history lesson on the meaning behind these cranes. This was a sad book but many great things can come from it and the meaning behind it.