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Hiroshima: Whose Story Is It?
- Children's Literature Association Quarterly
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 34, Number 3, Fall 2009
- pp. 229-240
- 10.1353/chq.0.1917
- Article
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Because the story of the destruction of Hiroshima is sensitive, Canadian Eleanor Coerr chooses to tell it to a North American audience through the eyes of a dying child in a version that neither interrogates nor critiques how the A-bomb could have been avoided. The absence of moral questions leaves open the wound of history painful to Japanese writers whose versions of Hiroshima more urgently insist that a repeat of such massive destruction is unthinkable. And yet, they too aim their message at a home audience and, as such, fail to challenge the official, popular histories recognized in both countries today.