I know Lois Lowry mostly as the Young Adult author of The Giver, she’s been around a long time!

This book was inspired by Lowry’s home movie where the USS Arizona was in the background—it was a ship bombed in Pearl Harbor.  The book depicts the lives of different populations in Hawaii, where Lowry was living as a child – the sailors, the people who lived there, and her own experiences. 

Although the stories are in poem form, they are almost like storybook stories as the charcoal type drawings that accompany them are simple with just enough detail. Although I don’t think the poems are expressly meant for young children, anyone in middle grade or older will be moved by the stories of the lives lost in the bombings of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima.