Reviews for West of Widdershins: A Gallimaufry of Stories Brewed in Her Own Cauldron

The average rating for West of Widdershins: A Gallimaufry of Stories Brewed in Her Own Cauldron based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-06-17 00:00:00 Renita Lovell While this is a picture book, and the language would be accessable by children, the content is harrowing. Approach with care - read it first yourself and be prepared to guide your child through this book. This book tells the story of a young girl who lived in a city called Hiroshima. It tells of the relatively carefree 1930s - her love of drawing, dislike of school, playing with friends and watching fireworks with her family during summer. It then plots the increasing militarisation of the general population, seen by her by having to wear special clothes and attend military training during school holidays. Then the bomb drops. Junko's illustrations, as always, are spot on. I particularly like the picture of the single B-29 (which we know is the Enola Gay) flying at high altitude - it looks so innocuous. The illustrations of the aftereffects are disturbing - but accurately reflect the true impact of a nuclear blast on the human body. My most haunting memory of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum was the images of people with their skin hanging from their fingernails - and this has been illustrated by Junko in this book... Pretty powerful. A must read - but go in with your eyes wide open as if you were going to read All Quiet on the Western Front rather than Where's Spot.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-12-31 00:00:00 Mikhail Prokhin 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.