SADAKO

Using soft-focus pastel images (created for a 1990 video) and a shortened text, Coerr's poignant story of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (1977) is recast in picture-book format. The author's abridgement omits transitional passages and details of Sadako's illness and rearranges events slightly, but the heart of her moving story is intact. Young's inexhaustible imagination creates images with dual meanings: the jacket closeup of Sadako's eyes is also a crane in flight and, in a series of small images on the first three pages, a mushroom cloud is transformed into a crane. A sensitive adaptation that makes a classic story accessible to a younger audience. (Biography/Picture book. 6-9)