On the Horizon

Lois Lowry's On the Horizon is a book of poems for 10 year olds about the people caught up in two terrible mornings.

What happens

It starts with a home movie. Lowry is three, playing on a beach in Hawaii with a little shovel. Years later she watched the film again and a friend told her to look at the horizon. The grey shape out there was the Arizona.

That's the whole idea of the book in one moment. She was right there. She never saw it.

The first part is about the men on that ship. Not the battle. The men. Leo Amundson from La Crosse, seventeen, who had joined the Marines in July. George and Jimmie Bromley, brothers with curly hair (there were thirty-seven sets of brothers aboard). The twenty-one members of the ship's band, who were on deck that morning waiting to play.

The second part moves to Hiroshima and to the children who were there on a summer morning in 1945. A boy playing hide-and-seek. A girl folding paper cranes in a hospital bed. A nearly four year old on a red tricycle he had named his friend.

The third part is Lowry herself, eleven now, riding a green bike round Tokyo after the war and not quite knowing how to say hello to the children she passed.

The poems are very short. Plenty of them run to a dozen lines or fewer. Some rhyme and some don't, and they're written plainly, which is exactly what makes them land.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Children die in this book and they die by name. Shinichi is buried in the garden with his tricycle. Sadako is twelve when she dies. There's a stretch about scorched men being pulled one by one out of burning oil. Lowry never lingers and never shows off about it, but it's all on the page.

So if your reader is tender about death, or has been worrying about wars on the news, this one probably wants reading together. If they're the sort who asks properly hard questions about history and wants real answers rather than a summary, it's wonderful.

What to read next

For more of Lowry doing exactly that, The Windeby Puzzle is in the library too. She takes a real body found in a German peat bog, two thousand years old, and imagines the Iron Age girl it might have been.