Hiroshima by Laurence Yep

Summary: Hiroshima is a narrative that is told in a non-fiction perspective. It is about a story of two young girls, Sachi and Riko, growing up in Hiroshima in the year the United States dropped the bomb on Hiroshima in World War II. Sachi is 12 years old, so she still attends school; Riko is older, so she no longer attends school because of the war she is needed for other duties. She actually works in the army headquarters, and Sachi works in the factories when she is not attending school. The book shows how different a twelve year old girl grows up in Hiroshima, rather than in the United States. It also describes all of the scientific information of the atom bomb the United States created called Enola Gay. It also went into great deal the horrible impact of the bomb. Riko had to jump into a river and grab onto a wooden bucket even though she did not know how to swim because she was running away from a fire caused from the bombing. Sachi was found by her mother laying in a heap of dead children outside of school; she was the only child who survived in the class. Yep also goes on to describe the aftermath of the bombing. Not only did over 75,000 people die when the first bomb at Hiroshima was launched, thousands of thousands months, even years later, from the radiation of the atom bomb. This book summed up the prelude, the actual bombing, and the aftermath in a very scientific, yet intriguing way.

Teachability: I think this book was very interesting how the author incorporated facts with a narrative story. It was extremely short- only 56 pages so I literally read it in about a half hour. I think it may have been too easy- I could see this being taught in a social science class along with the topic of Hiroshima and World War II. There was not much analysis that could be drawn from it, and that is why I am skeptical. There was no character development or anything of that nature, and that is why I think it is a wonderful book in terms of history and statistics, but not for an English class. I enjoyed it though, because I learned a lot of new things from reading it.