Shaw Kuzki’s Soul Lanterns is a quiet, powerful story for 10 year olds about a girl in Hiroshima who starts asking who her family’s lanterns are really for.<\/p>\n
Every August 6th, Nozomi’s family floats paper lanterns down the river for the people lost to the atomic bomb. It fell twenty-five years ago. Nozomi is twelve and wasn’t born then, so it’s always felt a bit like history.<\/p>\n
This year she notices something. Her mother always sets two lanterns on the water. One has a name on it. The other, a white one, never does.<\/p>\n
Then a strange old woman on the riverbank asks Nozomi how old she is, and whether she has an older sister, and hurries off in tears.<\/p>\n
It’s a mystery, but a quiet one. Nozomi slowly realises that nearly everyone around her is carrying a story they never tell. Her own grandmother. The shy art teacher with a limp, who paints the same empty schoolyard again and again. The neighbour who watches the children walk past her window every single day.<\/p>\n
When the art club plans an exhibition about Hiroshima then and now, the children start really listening to the grown-ups. At one point the art teacher tells his own story, in his own words, and it’s heartbreaking.<\/p>\n
The writing is clear and calm, which makes very hard things readable. There’s warmth in it too (Nozomi’s little brother only comes to the cemetery for the sweets afterwards).<\/p>\n
This isn’t a gentle read, though. In class the children learn that at the centre of the blast blood boiled and flesh melted. An uncle remembers walking through streets of charred bodies the next day. A young wife pulls the bodies of her two sisters-in-law on a cart to be cremated. Years later, children are still dying of leukaemia.<\/p>\n
None of it is written to shock. But it is upsetting, and a reader who finds death or war very hard to think about may struggle. For a thoughtful reader, ideally with a grown-up close by to talk it through, it’s an unforgettable way into a real piece of history.<\/p>\n
For poems about that same morning in Hiroshima, and about the attack on Pearl Harbor that started America’s war, try On the Horizon. Lois Lowry was a small child in Hawaii when the war came, and she writes about both mornings.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Shaw Kuzki’s Soul Lanterns is a quiet, powerful story for 10 year olds about a girl in Hiroshima who starts asking who her family’s lanterns are really for. Every August 6th, Nozomi’s family floats paper lanterns down the river for the people lost to the atomic bomb. It fell twenty-five years ago. Nozomi is twelve […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":12894,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":8337,"lr_next_read_anchor":"On the Horizon","lr_seo_hook":"A girl in Hiroshima wonders why one of her mother's lanterns has no name."},"book_tag":[20],"age_group":[29],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[905],"class_list":["post-8670","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-real-life-books","age_group-books-for-10-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-shaw-kuzki"],"yoast_title":"Soul Lanterns by Shaw Kuzki | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"A girl in Hiroshima wonders why one of her mother's lanterns has no name. For ages 10+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n