Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes

By Eleanor Coerr

This is another of the 100 books to read before you grow up that I spotted at Barnes and Noble in New York when I was there a while ago. It's a very simple story, easy to read, but it'll pull at your heart strings more than any book I've read so far. The girls in my class, particularly, are going to really enjoy it. But hopefully it'll get them thinking, and questioning.

Synopsis

Hiroshima-born Sadako is lively and athletic - the star of her school's running team. And then the dizzy spells start. Soon gravely ill with leukemia, an aftereffect of the atom bomb that fell on her city when she was only and infant, Sadako approaches her illness as she did her running - with irrepressible spirit. Recalling a Japanese legend, Sadako sets to work folding paper cranes. For the legend holds that if a sick person folds one thousand cranes, the gods will grant her wish and make her healthy again.

Author

Eleanor Coerr was a Canadian-born American writer of children's books, including Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes and many picture books. She was born in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, Canada, and raised in Saskatoon.
Her Japanese childhood best friend inspired her enduring interest in Japanese culture and history, which, in turn, eventually led her to write her most famous literary work.
She was born and raised in Saskatchewan, Canada. During her three-decade marriage to diplomat Wymberly De Renne Coerr (which ended with his death in 1996), she lived in the Philippines, Thailand, Brazil, Taiwan, the United States, and Japan.

Other books she has written:
Twenty Five Dragons (1971)
Biography of a Giant Panda (1975)
Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (1977)
The Big Balloon Race (1981)
The Bell Ringer and the Pirates (I Can Read Book) (1983)
The Josefina Story Quilt (1986)
Lady with a Torch: How the Statue of Liberty Was Born (1986) 
Chang's Paper Pony (1988) 
Chang's Paper Pony (1993)
Mieko and the Fifth Treasure (1993)
Sam the Minuteman (1995)
Buffalo Bill and the Pony Express (1995)
Sadako (1997)
Prairie School (2003)
S Is for Silver: A Nevada Alphabet (2004)
Circus Day in Japan: Bilingual English and Japanese Text (2004)
Josefina Story Quilt (Spanish: Josefina y la colcha de retazos) (2006)