Vulpina: The Story of a Fox Book

This book is author Junko Morimoto's own memories of the bombing of city Hiroshima 6th of August 1945 when she was a young girl. This is a picture book with a different picture on each page which is sometimes accompanied by a couple of lines. At one page when the bombing happened, the picture shows Junko and her sister clutching each other while they are surrounded by a brown cloud. You can't see anything else around them, and I feel like this creates a sense of the chaos and horror that they must have felt, while not quite knowing what is happening around them. Sometimes the pictures doesn't show what is told in the text, and I think that could be because it is a children's book and the author doesn't try to gloss over what happened, and the details can get quite brutal at times. I do think it is important to not gloss over history though, and the author herself has written at the end of the book that she feels that it is important to tell the history to children so that it won't be repeated. And I agree with her. While some pictures and details of the story can be brutal I believe that children can be told any story as long as they have an adult to talk about their experience with afterwards. Themes such as death and war doesn't have to be taboo as long as the children gets a chance to process their thoughts. One literary device the author used that I liked was that she changed the pictures at the end of the story from drawn pictures to pictures taken with a camera of herself visiting the site where her school had once been and two pictures side by side of what Hiroshima looked like when she visited as an adult. I felt like this effect made the story more real to me and I was a little taken aback because it made me a little emotional. Overall I don't see a reason not to read this book to a child, but I think it's important to talk about the story beforehand, afterwards and while reading, and listen to what the child has to say.