Mieko and the Fifth Treasure - Softcover

Eleanor Coerr was born in Kamsack, Saskatchewan, Canada, and grew up in Saskatoon. Two of her favorite childhood hobbies were reading and making up stories. Eleanor began her professional life as a newspaper reporter and editor of a column for children. Luckily, she traveled to Japan in 1949 as a writer for the Ottawa Journal, since none of the other staff wanted to go to a country that had been devastated by war. Coerr is the writer of numerous children's book and picture books.

Grade 3-5-- The four treasures of traditional East Asian calligraphy are brush, inkstick, inkstone, and paper. The "fifth treasure," as Mieko's art teacher has told her, is beauty in the heart, which breathes life into writing word-pictures (characters). Mieko lived in a village outside Nagasaki when the atom bomb was dropped. Flying glass badly damaged her writing hand and now, a few months later, she has been sent to live with her grandparents. Ashamed of her scars and certain she has lost the fifth treasure, Mieko withdraws into herself, rejecting school and her grandparents' efforts to help her heal psychologically. It is the subtle, beneficial influence of her new friend, Yoshi, and her overbearing aunt that helps Mieko overcome her fears and start to face life again. The child's inner and outer conflicts are believably handled, and readers will identify with her struggle towards normalcy after trauma. Much of the plot is obvious, but satisfying. The meeting with Yoshi's aunt is especially heavy-handed. With the plot unfolding in the months immediately after surrender, with Tokyo in ashes, rationing for nearly a decade, the collapse of the economy, and U. S. occupation forces just settling in, the fact that she blithely orders (and receives) luxury writing paper is a strain on credibility. Otherwise, this is a warm, sensitive, and well-written story with wide appeal. --John Philbrook, San Francisco Public Library
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.