Starred Review Rewriting her 1977 book Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (1977) for a younger audience and using pastel illustrations first created for the award-winning videotape of the same name , this picture book tells the moving story of a young girl dying of leukemia as a result of the bombing of Hiroshima 10 years earlier. At the beginning of the book, Sadako is a healthy young runner, which makes her a more sympathetic character and her death all the more poignant. The girl's hope, seen in her folding paper origami-style into cranes (a symbol of long life), becomes the symbol of mankind's hope for peace. Coerr uses a quiet, unsentimental voice in her retelling, letting the content of the story speak for itself. And it does, powerfully. Young amplifies the story's vision with his impressionistic pastel artwork illustrating scene after scene with narrative simplicity and emotional depth. A remarkable, moving book. (Reviewed Nov. 1, 1993)

Gr 2-6-This is the same story as the author's Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes (Putnam, 1977), told through an entirely new text. In this abbreviated version, the beautiful, limpid prose and crisp dialogue further telescope Sadako's fight with leukemia, ``the atom-bomb disease,'' adding greater impact to her death. What was an epilogue in the novel is here an integral, if anticlimactic, part of the text due to the exceptional flow of the illustrations. Young's pastels vividly capture all the moods of the narrative, place, and characters. The use of light, most obvious as Sadako lays dying, is particularly noteworthy, as is the crane motif as a recurring symbol of hope. A masterful collaboration that will attract many new friends for Sadako.-John Philbrook, San Francisco Public Library

A picture-book edition of Coerr's classic novel 'Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes' (Dell) is illustrated with artwork selected from the film version of the story. Young's glowing pastels accompany the true story of the Japanese girl, whose statue in Hiroshima is a powerful symbol of peace and hope.

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)"