On the Horizon: World War II Reflections

On the Horizon is a reflection of Lois Lowry’s experience living in Hawaii and Japan during and after World War II. She combines this with research and experience from others and putting them in poem form. I love the care she took in not only talking about Pearl Harbor, but also how the atomic bomb and the war affected Japan.

The writing is phenomenal. Lowry writes poetry with the beauty and flow that she has in her novels. The poems cover a variety of topics from her spending time as a child on the beach, to the band on the ship, to the soldiers. It also covers people that saw the atomic bomb from far away, a child that dies, and how the life of the people were drastically changed.

The illustrations in this book are amazing. They are black and white paintings. They help set the mood for each poem and present the main idea. My favorites are the sailors and the planes.

I think it gives the reader a good perspective that terrible things happened both in Pearl Harbor and in Hiroshima. People made mistakes and hurt and killed a lot of people. It’s also important to remember these mistakes so we don’t repeat them again.

I would recommend this for middle school and up because of the content being difficult to process.