Changes:The Last Cherry Blossom by Kathleen Burkinshaw

"The season changes when the last cherry blossom falls," said Papa.

Twelve-year-old Yuriko feels nothing but changes around her. Since Mama died, Papa has always been the center of her life, but then Aunt Komiko and her annoying five-year-old son Genji come to live with them. And then Papa tells her that he is going to marry Sumiyo, a kind woman who has helped out since Mama died, and the new people in the house all seem to come between her and her precious time with Papa. Komiko is always critical, ordering her around and seeming to find endless fault with her, while making her watch the rambunctious Genji, and though Sumiyo is good to her, Yuriko hates to share Papa with her.

In the Hiroshima of 1945, the long war, once so far away, now intrudes on everything, even at school:

"Get under your desks--now!" Yakamura-sensei shouted above the lonesome wail of the air raid siren. The teacher's voice did not waver, yet her hand had a light tremor as she pointed at the floor.

The familiar hum of the B-sans--what we called the American B-29s that flew overhead--thundered in my ears. The engines were so loud that the floor vibrated beneath my desk. I worried. Will we actually get bombed? Will this desk protect me? Is my papa safe?

Her best friend Machiko is forced by her father to destroy her beloved jazz records under orders of the government, although she hides her favorite under a mat in her bedroom. At school the students are given bamboo stakes to make into spears and made to practice defending their homeland. Strict rationing of metal, food, and fabric make life harder, and then news comes that Tokyo has been almost completely destroyed by a firebombing raid from the feared B-29s.

And then a chance remark by a neighbor lady forces Papa to tell Yuriko a family secret that seems to shake the very ground beneath her feet. She learns that she is actually Aunt Kumiko's daughter, the product of a dishonorable out-of-wedlock birth, that her beloved Papa is actually her grandfather, and no one will speak of her real father. Suddenly, Yuriko feels like an interloper in her once favored place in the family.

The friend she has relied on, Machiko, is forced to leave school and go to work at an aircraft factory, and Yuriko feels very alone at school and home. When she and her friend manage to be together, they listen to Machiko's secret record and try to look forward to the coming Cherry Blossom Festival.

We managed to find a picnic spot right under a beautiful cherry tree in full bloom. Petals of light and dark pink rippled with white hung on the branches.

Machiko and her family joined us. We began to unpack the delicious food we would share.

"Yuriko, the cherry blossoms seem pinker than usual. Do you think so?" said Machiko quietly. "I think we need to enjoy the beauty more this year since there is so much ugliness with the war."

I took a bite of my sweet rice cake. "We are both very lucky to have our families."

"And each other!" we added in unison.

And as that last blossom falls from Hiroshima's cherry trees, older readers who know history will foresee the great changes that will soon come for Yuriko and everyone in Hiroshima, Japan, and all the world, in Kathleen Burkinshaw's The Last Cherry Blossom (Sky Pony Press, 2016). Younger readers may not know that history, and the terrors the first atomic bomb brings will let them experience anew what it was to live through that significant moment in history.

Published today on the anniversary of the surrender of imperial Japan, in this beautifully but realistically written first novel author Burkinshaw lets Yuriko's honest first-person narrative recount what that moment in history was like. Chapter headings which feature headlines changing from "Imperial Army Continues Successful Attacks in China," to "Prepare For Final Battle on Imperial Soil," foreshadow the coming end of the war, as the author sensitively but honestly portrays the horror of the atomic attack and the following struggle for survival with emphasis on individual and family resilience and hope for the future.

Intimate and detailed, a poignant immersion in a particular time and place, this story is yet universal in its timeless theme of coming of age in a time of life and death, of war and peace, a time of the breaking of nations.

"Told with reverence and authenticity... tragedy and hope collide in this promising middle-grade debut." says Kirkus Reviews.

The Big War: "What Have We Done?"- Hiroshima by Laurence Yep

Laurence Yep calls this slim volume Hiroshima: A Novella, but it is less a fiction work than a literary docu-drama, shifting its focus, chapter by chapter, between deceptively ordinary morning life in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, The Enola Gay and its attendant B-29's flying toward the city, and expositions of the history of the Pacific war with Japan and the history of the bomb itself.

In stark, almost journalistic prose, Yep describes an ordinary morning in wartime Hiroshima, as his fictional character, twelve-year-old Sachi, joins classmates in the labor of clearing fire lanes inside the city in expectation of American bombings. Air raid warnings, shelters, and pitifully ineffective hoods worn to protect against fire bombings are part of the children's daily experience, but no human preparations can shield them against the coming destruction. Above them the lead B-29 reports a propitious hole in the clouds directly over the city and signals the Enola Gay to begin its run over the city. As its crew records the incredible devastation below, the overwhelmed co-pilot scribbles the question humanity has asked since, "What have we done?"

On the ground Yep factually describes the unbelievable effects of the blast: the nuclear wind, the silhouettes of vanished victims burnt into concrete walls, the nuclear rain which both extinguished the fires and brought death by radiation to those who escaped the blast.

Yep backtracks to describe the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor which began the war and the stubborn resistance of the Japanese people beyond the capitulation of the Third Reich which made the use of the atomic bomb seem inevitable. He moves forward in time to describe the reconciliation of the American and Japanese people, including the medical treatment of the Hiroshima Maidens, among whom he includes his fictional victim Sachi, and the peace movement which followed, touching upon the story of Sadako and the thousand cranes, the all-too-real threat of nuclear winter from the world's arsenal of weapons, and the nuclear treaties which now keep the threat of such weapons under tenuous control. Yep's final sentence is "It must not drop again."

Although this book is slim and the language simple, it is not a easy book for very young readers to take in. Its best audience would be middle readers, especially those who use Hiroshima as part of a class unit to explore the history and literature of this often glossed-over part of American history. Individual readers with some knowledge of the period will still find both facts and figures and ethical questions to ponder within. An extensive bibliography is appended.

Other significant works for young readers on this subject include My Hiroshima by Junko Morimoto, Hiroshima No Pika by Toshi Maruki, and Shin's Tricycle by Tatsuharu Kosama.

For capable older readers there is, of course, John Hersey's well-known work, Hiroshima.