If we encounter Cuba in a history book or social studies lesson, we may only remember how this country differs from ours; when we visit Cuba through the eyes of Drum Dream Girl who lives there, we imbibe her love of Cuban music (without it sounding exotic). Where the Mountain Meets the Moon and The Jumbies reveal that other countries have rich, imaginative storytelling traditions, too. Muslim and non-Muslim readers of Amal Unbound learn that Islam can be the majority religion. By briefly sharing Tree-Ear’s world-view in A Single Shard, we comprehend that people of other nationalities may be as proud of artistic heritage as we are. The Red Pencil, Like Water on Stone and Between Shades of Gray invite us to experience familial love, even though they portray genocide.  News reports about violence perpetrated in another country cannot provide this subtle balance; indeed, if we don’t acknowledge the potential for bias in nonfiction, it may leave us feeling righteous, superior or judgmental. One Plastic Bag reveals that people can solve problems ingeniously and without international assistance. Twenty-Two Cents demonstrates that original thinkers sometimes arrive at unique, ingenious ideas by taking quite the opposite of an accepted / American approach. ​

A friendship with Lesley Roessing is a gift. During the last several years we have been able to meet up twice at NCTE Conferences. Aside from these all too brief face to face meetings, we have managed to stay connected through email and through Lesley's wonderful blog posts. She is one of the most prolific readers and book reviewers I know. She keeps me informed about books and authors that need to be on my radar. I am always grateful for her blog posts.

Perhaps her most important posts have been those associated with 9/11. Without question, there are events in our lives that become markers because of their impact on society. For me, I remember clearly three crucial events -- The assassination of President John F. Kennedy, when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, and when planes struck the twin towers on 9/11/01. All three shaped how I see and respond to people and the world we inhabit. (I am quite sure the day Covid 19 began to personally effect my life --March 12, 2020-- will be another.) ​

Lesley has write about YA literature surrounding the events of 9/11 on three different occasions. You can find them below:

9/7/2018: Eleven Novels for Nine/Eleven: Studying & Discussing 9/11 through Diverse Perspectives” by Lesley Roessing
9/9/2019: 15 Novels to Generate Important Conversations about the Events & Effects of Nine Eleven by Lesley Roessing
9/9/2020: Examining the Events of September 11th through MG/YA Novels by Lesley Roessing


These year is the 20th time we will recite the names of those we lost. We have to acknowledge that non of the students in our k-12 schools were not alive, yet the consequences of those reverberate through their live in a variety of ways. In politics, in immigration policies. and in armed conflicts, just to mention a few. Of course, we must consider the lives of people who lost family and friends.

This year Lesley marks the event by reviewing more books and collecting some comments by YA authors who have written about that fateful day.

No historical event may be as unique and complicated to discuss and teach as the events of September 11, 2001, the day terrorists crashed planes into, and destroyed, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. At the time of this event no child in our present K-12 educational system was yet born, but, in most cases, their parents and educators would have been old enough to have some knowledge of, and even personal experience with, these events, making this a very difficult historic event for many to teach. However, with the devastation and impact of these events on our past, present, and future and as ingrained a part of history these events are, they need to be discussed and understood as much as possible.
 
On this  20th anniversary, the incidents of September 11, 2001 are still vivid in the minds and hearts of those who experienced and were able to comprehend these events. Many of our students have still not learned about the events, and many others do not realize the impact of those events on their world. One of the most effective ways to learn about any historical event, and the distinctions and effects of that event, is through a novel study—the power of story. 

I have previously written three guest blogs for YA Wednesday on novels set around 9/11 and decided on this anniversary to interview some of the authors of these important and necessary novels which should be in every community and school library and grade 4-12 ELA and social studies classroom libraries.
 
I asked some of the authors three questions, requesting that they choose one to answer. I share their fascinating answers.

• Jewell Parker Rhodes, author of Towers Falling
• Wendy Mills, author of All We Have Left
• Gae Polisner, author of In Memory of Things
• Tom Rogers, author of Eleven
• ​Kerry O’Malley Cerra, author of Just a Drop of Water
• ​Nora Raleigh Baskin, author of Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story
• Julie Buxbaum, author of Hope and Other Punchlines
• Catherine Stine, author of Refugees​

​Tom Rogers, author of Eleven:
​
Most story ideas emerge over time, but I can pinpoint the birth of Eleven to September 11, 2008. My nephew was visiting us in California and asked, "Uncle T, what's the big deal about 9/11?" His question shocked me at first, but a bit of digging revealed that schools weren't teaching about it; the topic was too fraught, and there were almost no books for kids to help tell the story of that awful day. Ironically, my nephew had just interviewed an older friend of mine, a Holocaust survivor who speaks to schoolkids about his experience so that humanity will never forget. I realized we need to be telling the story of 9/11 to future generations so that we, too, will always remember how the world changed that day. 

Gae Polisner, author of The Memory of Things:
​
After 9/11, and pretty much for the first time in my life, I was having a hard time coping. I had young children at home and suddenly didn't feel our world or country was safe for them anymore. Of course, in my earliest childhood, I was raised against a backdrop of, and always well aware of, war as my father was a young M.A.S.H. surgeon in Viet Nam, gone for a whole year. But beyond that, my childhood had felt safe and our country was in a peaceful and prosperous period where it -- we -- all felt pretty invincible. Until 9/11.
​
For weeks after, then months, that stretched closer to a year, I felt scared and off balance. Living under an hour from my beloved NYC (where I had lived pre-children), I didn't want to go in, ride over the bridges, visit landmarks I had loved. I was searching for ways to cope, and my brain started telling me to write about it. Write it out in story, with characters who are resilient and figure out how to rise against the immediate backdrop of destruction and despair. And so were born Kyle and the bird girl. Only typing this answer now does the "bird rising" connection even come to me. 

​Wendy Mills, author of All We Have Left:
​
The primary emotion we associate with 9/11 is grief  and anger, but when I decided to write this story, I knew I wanted to shine a light on the incredible bravery and strength of the  people trapped in the Towers, as well as the families dealing with the loss of their loved ones. I thought it was important to remember that on one the darkest days of human history that there were still these bright moments of light, of humanity. Alia’s story showed us the extraordinary courage of ordinary people that day, and I chose Jesse and her family, fifteen years after the events,  to symbolize one family’s journey from grief and anger to ultimately a place of acceptance and forgiveness.
​
I wanted to write a story that showed how important that day was to our country, but also to show the strength of the human spirit in the face of tragedy.

​Jewell Parker Rhodes, author of Towers Falling:
​
I love fifth graders! Selecting three fifth grade characters was an intentional choice.  In eight years, they will be old enough to vote and defend our country.  They need to know America’s history, past and recent.  Because adults are traumatized by 9/11 memories, we have steered conversations away from this pain.  But we need to be strong and engage children. Essentially, all youth born post-9/11 are, nonetheless, experiencing its’ traumatic legacy. 
In Towers Falling, Deja, an African American, experiences homelessness because her father, a survivor, has psychological trauma and is unable to work.  Her family, too, represents how mental health and medical bills are the leading cause of homelessness.  Her friend, Ben, is Jewish American and a New York transplant from Arizona, because his parents are divorcing. His father’s repeated deployments and PTSD has fractured his family but not his empathy for his friends.  Sabeen, a Muslim-American, represents how post 9/11, religious prejudice and the scapegoating of Muslim Americans as terrorists, continues. 
​
Sabeen, Ben, and Deja with their open hearts and curiosity embody the foundational American values of immigration, religious tolerance, and “liberty and justice for all.”

​Kerry O’Malley Cerra, author of Just a Drop of Water:
​
In September of 2001, I, along with the rest of the world, watched in horror as the attacks on New York City, The Pentagon, and in the sky over a tiny Pennsylvania town unfolded; yet as heart-wrenching as it was to watch on TV—I was glued to my TV for days—I was also swept up with the sense of patriotism that swelled deep for months after. Everywhere I turned, red, white, and blue saluted people across town from t-shirts, to pins on our lapels, to flags boasting in the sky. Neighbors–who usually came home, pulled into their garages, and closed their doors–suddenly stopped in their front yards to talk. People came together in ways I’d never experienced before.

Within a day or two of the attacks, my alternating moods of anger, sadness, and pride suddenly had a new emotion to deal with. Fear. It was discovered that Mohammad Atta, the hijacker of American Airlines flight 11, lived just around the corner in my smallish town of Coral Springs, Florida—over 1,000 miles away from the closest attack. What if I’d seen him around? What if my family and I had eaten next to him at a restaurant? It stunned me to the core.

It didn’t take long for more of the details involving that day to emerge. It seemed Atta and several of the other hijackers had made their way around South Florida unassumingly for months. But when it leaked that these men had taken flight lessons in Venice, Florida, and it was believed they’d had help from fellow Muslims living there, hundreds of “what ifs” began to haunt me. Every single one of them boiled down to the final, What if my friend’s parents had helped these men?

My friend was someone I’d met in college. He had come to the U.S. to study and get away from the strict Islamic rules of his upbringing, if only for a while. We grew close, and eventually my sister, my boyfriend, and I went to visit his devout Islamic family abroad, where his parents welcomed us into their home and treated us like old friends. A few years later, wanting to be closer to both of their boys who were then living in Florida, the parents decided to move to the states—Venice, Florida to be exact.

Flash forward to the days following September 11, I found myself doubting my friend’s family when I’d heard they were being questioning in connection to the attacks. Had they helped these terrorists somewhere along the way? I’d love to say I believed they were innocent, but I’d be lying. It took me a day or two to really know in my heart that they weren’t involved. Not these loving, welcoming people. I hated myself for having ever wavered in my thoughts of them to begin with, but the emotion of that tragedy ran deep. The emotion and fear of those days controlled me.

Not long after, I talked to my friend and asked how he and his family were doing. He told me that the FBI had cleared his parents, but life had become difficult for all of them. I listened to him talk, and though I didn’t admit it to him then that I had doubted them myself, he knows now. So do his parents, and I cannot thank his father enough for reading several drafts of this book and helping me get it right.

The feeling of regret stuck with me for a long time. Being a teacher, I looked at kids around me who rarely saw racial lines, and I wondered if this boy—my college friend—and I had been younger when September 11 happened, would I have ever doubted his family? Would I have had the prejudice that seemed to come with age? I began asking questions to anyone who wanted to discuss the subject. Soon I was taking notes, scouring the Internet, and reading books; I was amazed to learn that many non-practicing Muslim kids in the United States actually turned to mosques for answers following 9/11. The basis for my story developed in my head before I even realized I was writing it.
​
As a former history teacher, this was a story I knew needed to be told. It’s the type of novel I myself would have used in a classroom to supplement the textbook and to show kids, who didn’t experience that day firsthand, the enormity of the event that happened on our own soil and took thousands of lives—six of them from my own small town, a thousand miles away. I want children to know that sentiments changed from minute to minute, teetering between patriotism, alarm, grief, and so much more. One of my favorite scenes in the book is the one where Jake and his dad attend a memorial service three days after 9/11. That event is real. It moved me the same way it moved Jake. I hope it moves you, too.

​​Nora Raleigh Baskin, author of Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story:
​
When I started writing Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story, I knew exactly how many characters there'd be, who they'd be, and in what setting I needed to place them. I even knew the title! I wanted to show how the events of 9/11 affected everyone, across the entire county.  I didn’t want to limit my story to New York City or to the day of the attacks. That is another story, another book, for another writer to tell. 

For my story, I deliberately chose characters spanning from California to New York, rural to urban, black to white, boy to girl, Jewish to Muslim to Christian. I wanted to make them as different as I could to reveal how similar they actually are—how similar WE actually are—and to show how this tragedy connected us all in ways both big and small.
​
 Of course I wanted to, and I could have tried to include more, but it is already a challenge for young readers (and writers!) to keep track of multiple characters. So I kept it to four. And since setting in a story also refers to time, my book begins 48 hours before September 11, 2001. I wanted to draw a line between the before and the after and show how the world changed that day.

First there is Will, a boy living in Shanksville, PA, the town where the fourth plane crashed after being diverted from its target (The Capitol building) because of the incredible heroism of the passengers on Flight 93. 

I also wrote about Sergio, a boy in Brooklyn, who that morning witnessed the Twin Towers collapsing in a mushroom cloud of black smoke and white ash. He has a friend and mentor who is an EMT, who I chose because I knew I could not address the events of 9/11 without honoring the bravery of the first responders, many of whom died that day and in the days and years that followed. 

I brought Aimee to life in California. Her mother had a meeting at the World Trade Center that morning and narrowly escaped death. I needed to speak about the beauty of life and how we sometimes, sadly, only fully realize that when it is almost lost. 

And lastly, there's Naheed, an Iranian Muslim girl in Columbus, Ohio, whom I very consciously gave a Persian ancestry in order to point out a specific kind of bigotry. Not all Muslims are Arab; not all Arabs are Muslims; and not all Middle Easterners are Arab or Muslim or Jewish. As we know, after 9/11 the rise of Islamophobia and xenophobia exploded and was often directed blindly at anyone of Middle Eastern descent. I needed to show how the fear of terrorism generated an increase in this discrimination, an anger that was spewed widely and with ignorance.
​
In my small way, I wanted to help young readers open their eyes and their minds. I wanted them to learn about a time in our history that many adults felt was too hard, too scary, too sad to talk about. Reading can bring empathy, understanding, and knowledge—at least that was my hope.

Julie Buxbaum, author of Hope and Other Punchlines:
​
I've long struggled with the moments that cleave our lives into a before and an after, and there seems to be few modern shared before and afters quite like 9/11. Although there are a gazillion political ramifications from that day, I tend to be more interested in the personal legacies of loss. How they shape us. How we continue to live despite knowing that the world can cleave at any time. How we risk loving and losing. How we laugh in spite of it all. 
​
Baby Hope, an entirely fictional character and photo, became the long lens that allowed me to look more deeply at those questions. She also allowed me to explore the myriad ways 9/11 still isn't over. As many as four hundred thousand people are still struggling with health conditions related to that terrible day. By framing my story with a modern teenage girl, I hoped to introduce the legacy of 9/11 to the generation born since 2001, for whom the event feels like ancient history. Unfortunately, it is not.

Catherine Stine, author of Refugees:

​In the span of the seventeen years since my novel, Refugees was published, and a full twenty years since 9/11, life for Afghans has improved dramatically, and yet this fascinating country is also stubbornly resistant to change for reasons that I was able to profile in the book. It may have a centralized government on paper, but its localized, tribal structure holds firm. Its poppy trade is almost impossible to eradicate, as it is a huge money source, which keeps the Taliban in power. It seems likely that the Afghan army will still buckle under the Taliban. This will also set women’s rights back, but hopefully, they will not lose all hard-fought ground. Pakistan’s badgering influence still holds. There’s the infernal question of whether the USA should be a peacekeeping force to the world, or whether it’s really time to pack up and leave. These questions have no easy answers.
​
My intention with Refugees, was to present, through the personal lens of Johar, an Afghan boy and Bija, his little cousin, the day-to-day life, and the danger after 9/11 that also existed for those in Afghanistan. My extensive research taught me about their ancient culture, the intricacies of their tribal networks, and the stark beauty of the people. This information is relevant after all this time. Perhaps if I changed anything, it would be to hint that this was a snapshot in time, and that history often has circular cycles.

Gae Polisner, author of In Memory of Things:
​
I'm glad I wrote The Memory of Things when I did versus now as it would definitely have to be more political— and more divided—now. I'm always hoping young readers will see how, at that time, in the face of tragedy, we found our shared humanity much more readily and rallied together, human to human, without regard for politics.

Of course, that was on a whole, but there were splinters of misinformation and hate that arose from the event as well, and were, in fact, the spark of one form of ongoing hate in our country, and our stories deal with that . . . in The Memory of Things in particular, a moving moment when the kids head out of the subway on Stillwell Avenue on their way to Coney Island in the days after and pass heavily gated stores bearing Arabic names and signs that plead for us all to remember that they, too, are "[f]irst Americans." That was based on a sign I saw in a photograph during the research phase of my book, and if there's one thing readers take from my story after a simple sense of hope, it is that: our shared humanity.

​The 20 novels reviewed in this blog each present a different perceptive on these events, whether from the view of an 11-year-old boy waiting for his father’s return from a job that takes him into the Twin Towers, a 16-year-old whose family was torn apart 15 years before when her teenage brother died in  the Towers, a Muslim family facing racism on the days following 9/11, an adolescent coping with the possible physical effects of 9/11 syndrome after being rescued from her day care in the World Trade Center complex, fifth graders learning about events from 15 years before, or survivors from the March 11, 2011 Japanese tsunami visiting NYC to meet with survivors of September 11,2001. The stories are set in in a variety of settings, not only New York City, but Brooklyn, Chicago, Los Angeles, Shanksville, Florida, Japan, Pakistan, and Maine. These novels portray challenges, difficult decisions, loss, grief, uncertainty, PTSD, discovery, resilience, and heroism and are written in prose, free verse, and as a play for readers in a range of ages, reading levels, and interests.
 
                                                                           *                      *                      *

1. ​Baskin, Nora Raleigh. Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2016. 

The events of 9/11 are challenging to describe and discuss, especially with children who were not yet born, which at this point is most of our student population. I think that is so because, as adults, we each have our memories of that day and Life Before. I was a middle school teacher on the day the Towers fell. I remember standing in my classroom as our team teachers watched the morning news. Thankfully, our students were in their Specials and were not witness to the shock and tears on our faces. I don’t remember much of that day, but we were located in Philadelphia and did not immediately feel the effects. But the events o that day have affected our country and all our citizens as well as our contemporary world. The importance of studying and discussing 9/11 as part of American history is highlighted in Jewell Parker Rhoads novel Towers Falling, set in September, 2016.

Nine Ten: A September 11 Story is another novel effective in introducing young adolescent students to the many events of September 11, 2001. Nora Raleigh Baskin’s novel is set during the days leading up to 9/11—in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, Columbus, and Shanksvlle, Pennsylvania, where readers follow four diverse middle-grade students affected by the events of 9/11. Sergio, Naheed, Aimee, and Will first cross paths in the O’Hare Airport on September 9. The four young adolescents are Black, White, Jewish, and Muslim and are collectively surviving loss, guilt, poverty, parental absence, neglectful fathers, bullying, the navigation of peer relationships, as well as the angst of middle school, “…everything felt different, as if you suddenly realized you had been coming to school in your pajamas and you had to figure out a way to hide this fact before anyone else noticed.” (p. 48). In their own ways they are each affected by 9/11, and on September 11, 2002, these four and their families again converge at Ground Zero, each there for different reasons, but this time their paths back together have meaning.
 
There are a multitude of important conversations to be generated by this little novel, a story of Before and After. I was especially grateful that the events and heroes of Shanksville were memorialized. In fact there are many aspects of heroism brought forth in the novel to discuss. But Nine, Ten: A September 11 Story is the story of people and three days in their lives, “Because in the end it was just about people…Because the world changed that day, slowly and then all at once.” (p. 176).

2. Bunting, Eve. The Man with the Red Bag. Joanna Cotler Books, 2007.
 
“We don’t trust anymore, and that’s the saddest thing of all.’” (116)
 
Eve Bunting’s chapter book is not about the events of September 11, 2001, but it is about the effects and repercussions that we are still experiencing from 9/11.
 
Kevin Saunders and his grandmother go on a bus trip out West and immediately notice a fellow traveler, Charles Stavros, a man who says he is Greek but raised in America. A man who Kevin thinks looks like “…he might be Saudi Arabian or even Iraqian, if there is such a word. He was dark skinned, with bushy black eyebrows and a bushier mustache.” (2) And a man who constantly carries a red bag which he refuses to put down, even on a rafting trip.
 
Some of the other passengers worry that he is a terrorist and that his face looks familiar. As Kevin’s Grandma says, “It’s sad. People are quick to jump to conclusions now. If someone looks like that—” (10)
 
Kevin, a voracious reader of Joan Lowery Nixon mystery novels and his “much-read how-to-write-a-mystery book and is convinced that Stavros is a terrorist, is anxious to solve the mystery of the red bag which he is sure is holding a bomb. His elicits the help of the other young passenger, Geneva, who also wants to be a hero and appear on the Oprah show. Geneva’s eyes opened wide. ‘He does look exactly like a terrorist. I’ve never seen a real one, but I’ve seen pictures on TV.’” (39)
 
As they follow Stavros, even keeping watch on his various hotel rooms all night, they become more and more convinced that he is going to bomb an American monument, possibly Mount Rushmore, and that they can save the day. And then Kevin can write the mystery. “I didn’t want him to be Greek. I didn’t want him to be innocent. I didn’t want to lose my big mystery adventure. But just think how scary it would be if he wasn’t Greek. If he was something else! Having a mystery also meant having a terrorist aboard. And a bomb. Criminy! What did I want?” (60)
 
What they find ties Stavros to 9/11, but not in the way they think.
 
This is yet another perspective of the events and effects of September 11, 2001, appropriate for grade 4-8 readers. 

3. ​Buxbaum, Julie Hope and Other Punch Lines. Delacorte Press, 2019.

For many people the world is divided into Before and After, the dividing line being September 11, 2001. Such is the case for Abbi Hope Goldstein and Noah Stern.

On her first birthday Abbi was saved by a worker in her World Trade Center complex daycare center. As she is carried out, wearing a crown and holding a red balloon, the South Tower collapsing behind, a photographer takes the picture that has branded her Baby Hope, the symbol of resilience. Abbi spends her childhood and adolescence in relative fame; strangers hug and cry, share their stories with her, frame and hang the photograph in their homes, and news outlets hold “Where is Baby Hope Now” stories.

Noah was a baby in the hospital, fighting for his life, on 9/11 when his father went back to his office in the World Trade Center for his lucky hat, never to return home. He and his mother now live with her new husband and Noah is obsessed with comedy.

At age 15, Abbi is experiencing a suspicious cough, keeping it a secret from her parents and grandmother. Connie, the daycare worker, has recently died from cancer, most likely 9/11 syndrome, and Abbi takes a job as a camp counselor in a nearby town, looking for some anonymity and a chance at a “happily ever after” to the story that began with “Once upon a time” (9/11). Unfortunately, Noah, a fellow counselor, recognizes her and blackmails her into helping him interview the four other people in the iconic Baby Hope picture, convinced that the man in background wearing a Michigan cap is his father and also convinced, since his mother won’t talk about him, that his father chose not to come home after escaping from the Tower.

This is a novel about 9/11, one that presents yet more facets than many other 9/11 novels, such as 9/11 syndrome which is affecting many of those who were at Ground Zero, heroism and sacrifice, survivor guilt, and “[What] happens when the story you tell yourself turns out not to be your story at all.” (280)
​
This is primarily a novel about relationships—shifting relationships with family, friends, ex-friends, strangers, and romantic partners. I absolutely adored these characters—Noah and Abbi especially (and their evolving relationship) and Noah’s BFF Jack, Abbi’s divorced-but-best-friends-and-maybe-more parents, her grandmother who is experiencing the onset of dementia, and even Noah’s stepfather who learns to make jokes. I was sorry when the novel ended, not that the story was unfinished but my relationship with the characters was.

4. Cerra, Kerry O’Malley.  Just a Drop of Water. Sky Pony Press, 2016. (Middle Grades)
 
Relationships are built over time, but how much can they withstand? Jake Green and Sameed Madina have always been friends. They have grown up together; they run track together; they play war games together; they have each other backs; they plan to always remain friends “but only till Martians invade the earth.”

But then the events of September 11, 2001, occurred, and Martians did invade the earth, only they looked like Sam and his family—Muslim. Because one of the terrorists had lived in their neighborhood and was a client at the bank where Mr. Madina worked, Sam’s father comes under FBI surveillance, and the neighborhood divides in their support. Not Jake, though. He believes in his friend and his friend’s family, physically fighting the school bully who refers to Sam as a “towelhead” and arguing with his own mother whose own grief keeps her from supporting their neighbors.

When his father is taken into custody, Sam refuses to attend school, abandons his cross-country team, and distances himself from Jake, taking a new interest in the Islam religion. But Jake does not give up, and the boys reconnect to peacefully stop their racist classmates, Bobby and Rigo, from attacking the local mosque. Afterwards, Jake realizes that they both have been affected by 9/11; he has learned that you can be both scared and brave at the same time, but he has also has learned that adversity can be defeated peacefully. And Jake realizes that Sam is now different. “For the first time I see Sam, a Muslim. An American Muslim. But he is still just Sam, no matter what.”

5. Donwerth-Chikamatsu, Annie. Somewhere Among by Annie Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2016. 

Ema is binational, bicultural, bilingual, and biracial. Some people consider her “half,” and others consider her “double.” Her American mother says she contains “multitudes,” but Ema sometimes feels alone living in Japan somewhere among multitudes of people. 
​
When fifth-grader Ema and her mother go to live with Ema’s very traditional Japanese grandparents during a difficult pregnancy, author Annie Donwerth-Chikamatsu’s verse novel takes the reader through six months (June 21, 2001-January 2, 2002) of customs, rituals, and holidays, both Japanese and American. There are challenges, such a choosing a name for the new baby that brings good luck in Japan and that both sets of grandparents can pronounce. Ema celebrates American Independence Day and Japanese Sea Day, and she now views some days, such as August 15 Victory Over Japan Day from diverse perspectives.
 
On September 11, 2001 Ema experiences both two typhoons in her town and the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in America—on television. As the reader traverses the intricacies of two fusing two distinct cultures with Emi and her family, our knowledge of others is doubled.

6. DuBois, Caroline Brooks. The Places We Sleep. Holiday House, 2020.
 
2001:
“the year we moved to Tennessee,
the year of the terrorist attacks,
the year my period arrived,
the year Aunt Rose died,
and the year Dad left for Afghanistan.” (166)
 
Twelve year old Abbey is, as the boys in her new school call her, an Army brat. She has moved eight times, but this time she is not living on base with others like her. This time she attends a school where there is only one other new girl, Jiman, a Muslim-American of Kurdish heritage, born and raised in New Jersey.
 
Abbey is shy, uncertain, voiceless,
“I worry about people speaking to me
And worry just the same
When they don’t.” (27)
 
“Here’s what I’m used to being:
            the last to be picked,
            that girl over there,
            the one hiding behind her hair
            counted absent when present,
            the one who eats alone,
            sits alone,
the quiet type,
a sit-on-the-sidelines type,
the girl who draws,
 
and lately
‘Army brat.’” (107-8)
 
 
Luckily over the summer before school began, she made a new best friend, Camille, who is athletic and confident and has no trouble standing up to bullying.
 
As Abbey deals with her new school and the taunts of the other 7th graders and the boys on the school bus, the Twin Towers are hit and Abbey’s Aunt Rose is missing from her office on the 86th floor of the World Trade Center.
“Was she aware,
                        Unaware,
                                    Have time to prepare…
Have time to think, to blink,
Time to wish, to wonder,
Did someone help her,
Was she alone,
Did she whisper a prayer,…” (24)
 
During this year Abbey contends with her periods, her missing aunt, her mother’s temporary absence to New York to take care of Aunt Rose’s husband and children, the “Trio” of Henley Middle ( the popular Mean girls), the eventual deployment of her father,  and, on a positive note, the attentions of Jacob—Camille’s other best friend. Abbey also notices how people are treating Jiman who remains confident, appears comfortable alone, and stands up when her little brother is harassed, but has no one championing her. At times Abbey feels she should speak up on behalf of Jiman, but she continues to keep quiet, losing herself in her art.
            “What I don’t do
            is tell them to shut up,
            to leave people alone for once
because mostly I’m relieved
that they’ve forgotten
about me. “(120)
 
Through art, Abbey finally gets to know Jiman and gains strength from her, strength to become an upstander rather than a bystander. With Camille, Jacob, and Jiman as friends, Abbey realizes,
            “Sometimes it takes an eternity to figure things out,
            Especially when you’re in middle school.” (245)
 
Caroline Brooks DuBois’ debut novel written in free verse and formatted creatively on the pages is a coming-of-age novel, a novel of fitting in, gaining confidence, showing tolerance  and kindness towards others and standing up—for oneself and others. 

7. Gratz, Alan. Ground Zero. Scholastic Press, 2021.
 
Two children 18 years apart, both at the mercy of terrorists, both in death-defying situations, both fighting for their lives, and both showing courage and compassion for others as they live with grief. At one point they are both at their own Ground Zero.
 
Nine-year-old Brandon goes to work with his father at the Windows on the World restaurant on the 107th floor of the North Tower. The date is September 11, 2001. He leaves his father to go down to the Mall to buy something for a friend, and while he is descending in an elevator, the first plane hits the Tower. As Brandon tries to make his way up to his dad and then, when that is impossible, back down to fulfill his father’s wishes, “Brandon, hang up [the phone] and get out of the building as fast as you can.” (158) and “You’re strong. You can survive without me.” (234), he meets Richard who takes him under his wing. “It didn’t feel weird at all to Brandon to be clinging to a stranger right now. It was reassuring to connect with someone else who was sharing the struggle to survive.” (104) Together, on the way down, Brandon witnesses every horror—elevators filled with people crashing, workers falling and jumping out of the building to their deaths, people catching on fire—but the people he and Richard meet collaborate to help each other until finally Brandon makes it to safety and is able to save Richard when the Tower collapses.
 
Meanwhile on September 11, 2019, Reshmina, an 11-year-old Afghani, lives with her family in a small village in the middle of constant fighting between the Americans and the Afghan National Army and the Taliban. Her sister had been accidentally killed by American soldiers on Hila’s wedding day “We’re fighting a war again the Taliban. Sometimes innocent people get hurt.” (246). When an American soldier is hurt, with conflicting emotions, Reshmina hides him in her house, she puts her family and her village in grave danger. Her resentful twin Pasoon leaves home to join the Taliban and to tell them about the soldier. In danger Reshmina and her family leave to hide in a cave. “She had chosen what was right over what was easy. She had dared to be someone new, someone better, to carve a path for herself. And look where it had gotten her; buried with her family in a grave of her own making.” (245) After Reshmina’s ingenuity helps her family and the villagers to successfully escape the collapsed cave, the American soldiers sweep in to rescue Taz and order a strike against the Taliban. Again accidently, the houses in the village are all wiped out. “When they were all safe, they all turned and watched as the village slid down into nothing, swallowed by the great brown cloud of dust that came roaring at them like a lion.” (282) “‘That was not supposed to happen.’ ‘And yet it did,’ Reshmina said.” (283)
 
When Brandon’s and Reshmina’s stories converge, readers learn just how complicated is the present American military involvement in Afghanistan and the ongoing impact of revenge.

8. Levithan, David. Love is the Higher Law. Random House Children’s Books, 2009.
 
“…even if I felt something was wrong, I would never have pictured this. This isn’t even something I’ve feared, because I never knew it was a possibility/” (5) “’We are not supposed to comprehend something like this,’ my mother says to me…. I don’t want to comprehend. Instead, I will try to remember what matters.” (16)
 
The attacks of September 11, 2001, affected our country as a whole, but it is even harder to imagine the effect on those who lived in NYC. Claire, Peter, and Jasper are three teenagers living in NYC on that date. Claire leaves her high school to pick up her brother from his elementary school; Peter has already left school and is at the record store, thinking about his impending date with Jasper; and Jasper is at home alone, his parents visiting their native Korea, before he leaves for college. None of the three are directly affected—none of their parents worked in the World Trade Center, none of their friends or relatives were killed; they were not physically hurt—but the events of this day color the year following. “I want to know why this is so much a part of me.  I want to know why this thing that happened to other people has happened so much to me.” (104)
 
Readers view the day through their alternating perspectives. We view the constructive acts of strangers as Claire observes,  “There are skyscrapers collapsing behind us, and nobody is pushing, nobody is yelling. When people see we’re a school group, they’re careful not to separate us. Stores are not only giving away sneakers, but some are handing out water to people who need it. You’d think they’d take advantage and raise the prices. But no. That’s not what happens.” (14) and Peter reflects,  “And the people I care about, suddenly I care about them a little more, in this existential way.” (82)
 
Even though Peter and Jason’s date does not go well, another ramification of the day, the three become friends, especially Claire and Peter who attend high school together, Jason returning to college. And the year continues, each is a little changed. As Peter observes, “ If you start the day reading the obituaries, you live your day a little differently.” (123)
 
By December Jasper observes that he has finally gone an entire day without thinking of 9/11 but then wonders what that means. Claire feels the weight of the day lighten a little, but “It is still strange to see the skyline. I have never seen an absence that it so physical.” (126)
 
On the anniversary of 9/11 Claire retraces the steps she took on that day, and Peter and Jason finally have a second date. On March 19, 2003, the day of the United States invasion of Iraq, the three reunite, and Claire observes, “And we are so different from who we were on September 10th.  And also different from who we were on the 11th. And the 12th. And yesterday.” (163) Together they have found the “antidote” to the fear and uncertainty; they have each other as they individually navigate the world and remember what matters.

9. Lowitz, Leza. Up from the Sea. Ember, 2016.
 
“The bigger the issue, the smaller you write.”--Richard Price
Instead of focusing on the overwhelming statistics generated by the March 11, 2011 earthquake and resulting tsunami in Japan—nearly 16,000 deaths and 3,000 people missing—the event becomes even more intense and compelling as author Leza Lowitz relates the story of one town and one boy and the resilience of many.

The story begins on March 11 when Kai, a half Japanese, half American 17-year-old and his teachers and classmates experience the “jolting of the earth,” and as trained, they evacuate, running for their lives, looking for the highest place, as their town is destroyed. Written powerfully in free verse, the reader feels the fury of nature as the water “churns,” “thrashes,” “surges,” “sweeps,” “charges.” Kai ends up in a shelter having lost his mother, his grandparents, and one of his best friends. His father left years before to return to America.

Faced with overwhelming loss and trauma, Kai walks into the ocean but is saved by one of his classmates and convinced to accept the opportunity to go to New York City on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 where he will spend some time with young adults who lost their parents as teens in the 9/11 attacks. At Ground Zero, Fia tells him, “Bravery means being scared and going forward anyway.”

Kai hopes to find his father in NYC but returns to his village to help the young adolescents who lost their families and to rebuild his town. “I want to be/ like that tree/ deep roots/ making it strong/ keeping it/ standing tall.” And it is to his roots Kai returns and stays—“The quake moved the earth/ ten inches/ on its axis./ I guess/I shifted,” too.”


Up from the Sea, well-written as a verse novel (a format that engages many reluctant readers), would serve as an effective continuation to a 9/11 study. Readers should already be aware of the events of 9/11 to understand the connection between Kai and Tom but will comprehend the trauma and loss experienced, and resilience that is required, by anyone who faces adversity.

10. Maynard, Joyce. The Usual Rules. St. Martin’s Press, 2004.
 
The Usual Rules is an emotional and insightful novel about the effects of the events of September 11th on the families and friends of the victims—those left behind.
The reader learns about the close relationship between 13-year-old Wendy and her mother through flashbacks: her mother's divorce, the sporadic visits of her father, her mother's marriage to her "other dad," and the birth of her half-brother. And then her mother goes to work at her job at the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001—and does not return. Wendy’s world changes. “Then September happened and the planet she lived on had seemed more like a meteor, spinning and falling” (p. 175).

The reader experiences not only Wendy's (and Josh's and Louie's) loss but the suffering and uncertainty of those left behind. Could her mother be walking around, not remembering who she is? As the family hangs signs, we learn how different this loss was for many people who held out hope for a long time without a sense of closure. And this loss was different because it was experienced by many—an entire country in a way. “Instead of just dealing with your own heart getting ripped into pieces, wherever you looked you knew there were other people dealing with the same thing. You couldn’t even be alone with it” (p. 95).

We see the loss through the eyes and hearts of a daughter, a very young son, and a desperately-in-love husband. Wendy leaves Brooklyn and goes to her biological father’s in California. Among strangers, she re-invents her life. As those she meets help fill the hole in her life, she fills the hole in theirs. Books also help her to heal.

Even though there are quite a few characters in this novel, but they all are well-developed, and I found myself becoming involved in all their lives, not only Wendy, Josh, and Louie and even his father Garrett, but Wendy’s new friends—Carolyn, Alan, Todd, Violet… On some level they all have experienced trauma and loss, and within these relationships, Wendy is able to heal and return to rebuild her family.

Although I did not want this novel to end and to leave these characters, this well-written novel taught me more about the effects of September 11, loss, and the importance of relationships and added a new perspective to my collection of 9/11 novels.

11. Mills, Wendy. All We Have Left.  Bloomsbury, 2016.
 
September 11. A day that changed all our lives in some way. As we see in Nine, Ten: A September 21 Story, there clearly was a Before and After. But there also was a Then or That Day and an After.

All We Have Left was so compelling that I read from dawn to dusk and did not put the book down until I finished. The novel intertwines two stories, that of 18-year-old Travis and sixteen-year-old Alia who were in the Towers as they fell and the story of Travis’ sister, Jesse, who, fifteen years later, is part of a dysfunctional family whose lives are still overwhelmingly affected by That Day and Travis’ death.

Seventeen year old Jesse is not sure who she is, who she should be, who she should hate, and who she can love. Her life is overshadowed by 9/11, her mother’s mourning, and her father’s hate.

But both Alia in 2001, and Jesse in 2016, learn that “Faith and strength aren’t something that you wear like some sort of costume; they come from inside you” (p.329) as does love. And Jesse realizes that she has to work on “treasuring right here, right now, because that’s important.” As one character says but all the characters learn, “You can fill that void inside you with anger, or you can fill it with the love for the ones who remain beside you, with hope for the future.”

What I appreciated about this novel is that is shows yet another side of how 9/11 affected people, especially adolescents, those adolescents who populate American schools everywhere. I strongly feel that students should not only be learning about the events and effects of 9/11, but that, through novels, readers learn more about how events affect people and especially children their ages. 

12. Padian, Maria. Out of Nowhere. Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2013.
 
Another novel as a complement to a 9/11 Novel Study would be Maria Padian’s novel about the ways life in an idyllic small Maine town quickly gets turned upside down after the events of 9/11.
 
“Things get a little more complicated when you know somebody’s story.…It’s hard to fear someone, or be cruel to them, when you know their story.”

The majority of the 21.3 million refugees worldwide in 2016 were from Syria, Afghanistan and Somalia. The United States resettled 84,994 refugees. Together with immigrants, refugee children make up one in five children in the U.S. More than half the Syrian refugees who were resettled in the U.S. between October 2010 and November 2015 are under the age of 20.
.
In Out of Nowhere narrator Tom Bouchard is a high school senior. He is a soccer player, top of his class academically, and well-liked. He lives in Maine in a town that has become a secondary migration location for Somali refugees. These Somali students are trying to navigate high school without many benefits, including the English language. They face hostility from many of their fellow classmates and the townspeople, including the mayor; one teacher, at the request of students, permits only English to be spoken in her classroom.
 
When four Somali boys join the soccer team, turning it into a winning team, and when he is forced to complete volunteer hours at the K Street Center where he tutors a young Somali boy and works with a female Somali classmate, Tom learns at least a part of their stories. Tom fights bigotry, especially that of his girlfriend—now ex-girlfriend, but he still doesn’t comprehend the complexity of the beliefs, customs, and traditions of his new friends, and his actions have negative consequences for all involved. While trying to defend the truth, Tom learns a valuable lesson, “Truth is a difficult word. One person’s truth is another person’s falsehood. People believe what appears to be true and what they feel is true.”

13. Polisner, Gae. The Memory of Things. St. Martin’s Griffin, 2016.
 
The first 9/11 novel I read, The Memory of Things is lovely story about the effects of the events of 9/11. Another reason we read is to understand events we have not experienced and the effect of those events on others who may be like ourselves. After witnessing the fall of the first Twin Towers on 9-11 and evacuating his school, teenager Kyle Donahue, a student at Stuyvesant High School, discovers a girl who is covered in ash on the Brooklyn Bridge; she has no memory of who she is. The son of a detective, he takes her home to help her rediscover who she is, why she was where she was, what she was doing there, and her connection to the events.
 
Author Gae Polisner wrote The Memory of Things in alternating narratives—Kyle's in prose, the girl writes in free verse—the two characters sharing their stories and perspectives, introducing adolescent readers, many of whom had were not alive during 9/11, to the effects of this tragedy in their own ways.

14. Rhodes, Jewell Parker. Towers Falling.  Little, Brown and Company, 2016. 
 
I was a middle-school teacher in 2001. It was challenging to know how to discuss the events of 9/11 as we lived through them. How is a teacher to meaningfully discuss this momentous event with students who were not even born in 2001? Falling Towers is a thoughtful, provocative, well-written, albeit emotional, novel about this topic written sensitively and appropriately for readers as young as Grade 4, an ideal novel for middle grades Social Studies classes as it focuses on not only the history of 9/11 and its place in American history but the ever-widening circles of relationships among, and connections between, Americans beginning with families, friends, schools, communities, cities, states, countries.
 
The 5th grade characters explore “What does it mean to be an American?” as well as why history is relevant, alive, and, especially, personal as three students—one Black, one White, one Muslim—explore the effects of the events of 9/11 on each of their families. Déja’s “journey of discovery” about the falling of the Towers helps her father work through his connection to the event and his resulting PTSD.

15. Rogers, Tom. Eleven. Alto Nido Press, 2014.  
 
“After today, everything’s changed.”
“Sometimes when a terrible thing happens, it can make a beautiful thing seem even more precious.”

Eleven is the story of Alex who is turning 11 on September 11, 2001. I was concerned that the character would be too young for this topic. I also thought that, the character age’s implied that the novel wouldn’t contain the complexity the topic deserves. but, boy, was I wrong! I was hooked with the complexity of the first 2-page chapter. I wasn’t sure what was happening in this introductory chapter, but it was not a feeling of confusion as much as “It could be this; no, it could be this…” and inference and interpretation, even visualization.

I also forgot that New York City kids grow up faster, taking public transportation throughout the city, but more importantly, I forgot that when you need or expect a young adolescent to rise to the occasion, he will.

Alex loves airplanes and dogs—and he doesn’t realize it, but he loves his little sister Nunu who is relegated to her side of the bedroom they share by a black and yellow “flight line” down the middle of the room. And he loves his father, even though Alex told him, “I hate you,” the night before 9/11. When the Towers fall, Alex rises to the occasion, taking care of his little sister and an abandoned dog, making the sacrifice to return the dog he has always wanted to his owners when the vet finds a chip, facing bullies, making “deals” in the hopes these deals and good works will offset what he said to his father and ascertain his return from the Towers, and comforting Mac, a lonely man who is awaiting his only son’s return from the Towers.

In Eleven author Tom Rogers builds a character who is authentic, a kid who events serve to turn into a young man. Alex’s mother had said to him, “I need you to be grown up today” and, even though he was focusing on his misdeeds of the day, he did. “I’m proud of you, young man…. Young Man. Alex liked how that sounded.”

This book is not graphic but does not skirt the events. Readers hear the news announcement about the four airplanes and, more chilling, a description of an empty hospital—“There were no gurneys rolling through to the ER, no sick and wounded in pain. There wasn’t a patient in sight. And he knew then that none would be coming.” A powerful examination of the events of 9/11 and how they affected ordinary people—and one boy’s birthday.

16. Stine, Catherine. Refugees. Delacorte Books for Young Readers, 2005.
 
Refugees adds another dimension to the 9/11 novels.

Dawn is a foster teen who runs away to New York City and becomes affected by the events of 9/11. As she plays her flute on the streets near Ground Zero to earn money for food, she is approached by families of victims who ask her to play for them and the memories of their loved ones. As Dawn comes to believe this is her mission, she teaches herself music she feels appropriate for those of many cultures and stages of life. In doing so, she opens up to strangers and new friends, something she couldn't do with her foster mother.

Johar is an Afghani teenager, weaver, and poet. His father is killed by the Taliban, his mother is killed by a land mine, his older brother joins the Taliban, and his aunt is missing, leaving Johar to care for his three-year-old cousin. He and his cousin flee to a refugee camp in Pakistan where he works for the Red Cross doctor, Dawn's foster mother, another person who must learn to show love.

Dawn and Johar connect through phone calls and emails, and as they all work toward forming a family—one that spans the globe—the reader learns how war, the U.S. involvement, and the events of 9/11 affected those in many countries. This would be a book I would recommend for proficient readers with an interest in war or history.

P.S. After I read this book and posted my original Goodreads review, I was listening to a discussion about the days following 9/11 in the Middle East on NPR and found that I could actually follow it; therefore, I realize that I learned more than I thought from this novel.

17. Tarshis, Lauren. I Survived the Attacks of September 11, 2001. Scholastic Inc., 2012.

I SURVIVED The Attacks of September 11, 2001 is now available as a graphic novel re-adaptation of Lauren Tarshis' 2012 novel, written by Tarshis and illustrated by Corey Egbert.
 
“A bright blue sky stretched over New York City.” That is what many of us who were alive on September 21, 2001, remember—the cloudless blue sky of northeastern United States—the contrast between the perfect day and the day which has changed our world.
 
As the son of a firefighter, Lucas was aware of the effects of danger and disasters. His father had been severely injured in a warehouse fire and was still not himself (“It turned him quiet.”). It had been a while since they had worked together on the firetruck model in the basement. But it was another tragedy that brought them back together as a family.
 
Lucas had sneaked into NYC that September 11 morning to ask his uncle to intercede on his behalf. After three concussions in two years of football, his parents and doctor were taking him off the team, and Lucas loved being on a team, a team of two with his father, his dad and uncle’s Ladder 177 firehouse, and especially his football team. Lucas was near Ground Zero when the planes hit the Towers, and when his father went looking for him, they were able to make it safely back to the fire station, helping others along the way.
 
Readers view the attacks of 9/11 up close and personal through Lucas’ eyes; they experience his loss, the heroism of the firefighters, and the resilience of his father. We feel the dust of the falling Towers, see the sky fogged with dust and ashes. “It wasn’t like regular dust. Some of the grains were jagged—bits of ground glass.… The dust, Lucas realized. That was the tower. It was practically all that was left.”
 
The story ends on a realistic but positive note with Lucas, not a player, but still a valued member of the football team.  “Nothing would ever be the same again.” But his father told him, as time passed, it would get, not easy, but easier.
 
This was the first book in Tarshis’ I Survived series that I have read, and I was impressed with the writing, development of the main character, and the complexity of ideas presented in such a short text. This novel could be employed for MG or YA readers who are less proficient or more reluctant readers; English Language Learners who may not be ready for a longer or more complicated text; students who are short on time through absences, trips, or other obligations or who joined the class during the unit; or as a quick whole-class read for background before students break into book clubs to read one of the other 9/11 novels.

18. Thoms, Annie, ed. With Their Eyes: September 11th: The View from a High School at Ground Zero. HarperTempest, 2002.
 
“Journalism itself is, as we know, history’s first draft.” (xiii)
With Their Eyes was written from not only a unique perspective—those who watched the attack on the World Trade Center and the fall of the towers from their vantage point at Stuyvesant High School, a mere four blocks from Ground Zero, but in a unique format. Inspired by the work of Anna Deavere Smith whose work combines interviews of subjects with performance to interpret their words, English teacher Annie Thoms led one student director, two student producers, and ten student cast members in the creation—the writing and performance—of this play. 
 
The students interviewed members of the Stuyvesant High study body, faculty, administration, and staff and turned their stories of the historic day and the days that followed into poem-monologues. They transcribed and edited these interviews, keeping close to the interviewees’ words and speech patterns because “each individual has a particular story to tell and the story is more than words: the story is its rhythms and its breaths.” (xiv) They next rehearsed the monologues, each actor playing a variety of roles. Although cast members were chosen from all four grades and to represent the school’s diversity, actors did not necessarily match the culture of their interviewees.
 
They next planned the order of the stories to speak to each other, “paint a picture of anger and panic, of hope and strength, of humor and resilience” (7), rehearsed, and presented two performances in February 2002.
 
With Their Eyes presents the stories of those affected by the events of 9/11 in diverse ways. It shares the stories of freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors, special education students, an English teacher, a Social Studies teacher, the School Safety Agent, the Building Coordinator, a dining hall worker, a custodian, an assistant principal, and more, some male, some female, some named, others remain anonymous. Written as a play, readers are given a description of each character. Read and performed as a play, readers will experience the effect of Nine Eleven on others, actual people who lived that day and persisted in those days that followed, sharing their big moments and little thoughts.
 
“the air felt on the outside like something that you might smell at a,
or feel at a barbecue,
but it didn’t, it…it hurt you.
It hurt your windpipe.
I could feel like, things collecting on my esophagus or on my lungs,
and I don’t think that is something that I will ever forget.” (44)
--------
“and you know
what an odd thing this is
a peculiar little odd thing
just a little quirk, just
an odd thing, but, ah, the day before
on Monday evening I had taken the time to shine my shoes.
‘cause it’s kind of weird I took the time to shine my shoes
and I did a good job, right,
and then Tuesday morning
it was a beautiful sunny day
you know
and as I was dusting myself off
from the debris of the north tower
I—I shook my clothes off and then I looked down
at my shoes and my shoes were a whole ‘nother color
they were completely covered
and I thought to myself
‘I just shined them yesterday’…” (102)
--------
And the pregnant English teacher who said,
 
“…during that time of feeling afraid I felt like I was
crazy to be in New York…
and I had lots of conversations with my friends about
whether or not we would…
we would consider, you know, just completely changing our
lives and leaving New York
So far I don’t know anyone who has done that.
But do I plan to raise my child in New York? Yes.” (90)
 
You know, I really believe in healing
And I believe that, the city will
um… be
healed.
I think you have to believe that.” (93)
 
With Their Eyes was written with the thoughts and pens of a school community.

19. Walters, Eric. We All Fall Down. Penguin Random House Canada, 2006.
 
“The sky was so blue, without the trace of a single cloud, that it looked like a postcard. It felt more like a summer day than a September day. It was a nice day not to be in school. Then again, being in my father’s office wouldn’t be that much different or better. (36)
 
The day was September 11, 2001, a teacher meeting day during which students at Will’s high school were to shadow their parents at their workplaces. Ninth-grader William’s father John worked in international trade in the World Trade Center.
 
Upon arrival, father and son went to the 107th floor Observation Deck for a quick tour and history of the Center and view of the city. “Maybe my father was right and the World Trade Center and all the money that passed through here each day really did represent the United States.” (42)
 
At 8:46, shortly after arriving at John’s office on the 85th floor of the South Tower, they felt the force of an explosion. And as he looked out the window Will saw a gaping hole in the North Tower, billowing smoke, thousands of pieces of paper—some on fire—and, before he could look away, he was horrified to notice a man and woman jumping from windows of the building.
 
Will’s father, as acting head of his office and fire warden for the floor, demanded that his staff and other businesses on the floor close and evacuate for the day. But at 9:03, just before John and Will were able to leave, the second plane hit the South Tower.
 
Readers follow the father and son as they make the harrowing journey down 85 floors through heat and smoke, formulating split-second decisions and stopping to rescue and carry an injured woman, only to experience the collapse of the building as they reach the lobby.
 
A quick but dramatic read, Eric Walters’ novel lets readers experience a close-up account of the day and the panic and fear and heroism of ordinary people—John and Will, the men carrying a man in a wheelchair, the firemen and police—as Will discovers another side of his father and John realizes how much time he has devoted to his job rather than to his family.
 
The title derives from the children’s rhyme “Ring Around the Rosie,” a song that is actually about the Black Death during the Dark Ages. Will learns this in history class on the previous school day, a foreshadowing of events to occur. 

20. ​Walters, Eric. United We Stand. Penguin Random House Canada, 2006.
 
The sequel to We All Fall Down  begins on September 12, 2001 when Will’s best friend’s father, a firefighter at Ground Zero, last seen as he climbed the steps of the North Tower, is missing.

21. Neesha Meminger. Shine, Coconut Moon

“After September eleventh, I never felt more un-American in my whole life, yet at the same time, I felt the most American I’ve ever felt too. I never knew it, but this has been a recurring theme throughout my life and it seemed to get shoved into my face after the attacks on the World Trade Center.” (150-151)
 
Samar Ahluwahlia is an Indian-American teen living in Linton, NJ, with her mother who turned her back on her family and religion. When the events of September 11th occurred, shaking Sam as well as her classmates and community, she didn’t realize that those events would affect her personally. Until her Uncle Sandeep appeared on their doorstep.
 
“Before Uncle Sandeep walked back into my life, I’d never cared that I was a Sikh. It really didn’t have much impact on my life,…. But that was before 9/11. The Saturday morning that Uncle Sandeep rang our doorbell had one of those endless, frozen blue skies hanging above it; the same kind of frozen blue sky that, just four days earlier, had born silent witness to a burning Pentagon and two crumbling mighty towers in New York City. And the cause of all those lost lives was linked to another bearded, turbaned man halfway around the world. And my regular, sort of popular, happily assimilated Indian-American butt got rammed real hard into the cold seat of reality.” (10)
 
After becoming re-acquainted with her personable, loveable and loving, optimistic uncle, visiting his gurdwara (temple), and watching the harassment and hate aimed against him even though he is Indian, American, and Sikh, rather than the Middle Eastern and Muslim, Sammy decides she wants to learn more about Sikhism and meet her family, hoping to have what her best friend Molly has with her large Irish family. “This discovering more about myself stuff is addictive. It’s like starting a book that you just can’t out down, only it’s better because the whole book is about you.” (110)
 
After being termed a “coconut” by an Indian girl at school and learning about the WWII Japanese internment camps, Sam begins researching intolerance, joins a Sikh teen chat group, and convinces her mother to take her to visit her grandparents where she is exposed to the traditional “values” that caused her mother to rebel.
 
However, when Molly includes their childhood enemy Bobbi Lewis in their friendship and Sam finally acknowledges that the supportive Bobbi has changed or maybe isn’t whom she thought, Sam realizes, “If we give them a chance, people could surprise us. Maybe if we didn’t make up our minds right away, based on a few familiar clues, we’d leave room for people to show us a bunch of little, important layers that we never would have expected to see.” (149)
 
Through the repercussions of 9/1l, her newly-expanded family and group of friends, her research into history and the Sikh religion, and experiencing the narrow-mindedness of her boyfriend, some of the kids at school, and even her grandparents, Sam realizes the dichotomy of being a coconut. “I thought of Balvir’s definition of a coconut: brown on the outside, white on the inside, mixed-up, confused. And then Uncle Sandeep’s: The coconut is also a symbol of resilience, Samar. Even in conditions where there’s very little nourishment and even less nurturance, it flourishes, growing taller than most of the plants around it.” (247)

22. N. H. Senzai. ​Shooting Kabul

“The driver hit the gas and the tires squealed as the truck made a sharp turn and then accelerated right though a bombed-out warehouse onto a parallel alley. Fadi looked from the edge of the truck’s railing in disbelief. His six-year-old sister had been lost because of him.” (25)
 
Fadi’s father, a native Afghan, received his doctorate in the United States and returned to Afghanistan with his family five years before to help the Taliban rid the country of drugs and help the farmers grow crops. But as the Taliban became more and more restrictive and power-hungry and things changed, Habib, his wife Zafoona, Noor, Fadi, and little Mariam (born in the U.S.) need to flee the country. During their nighttime escape, chased by soldiers, Fadi loses his grip on Mariam as they are pulled into the truck, and she is lost.
 
Eventually making it to America, the family joins relatives in Fremont, California. “Fremont has the largest population of Afghans in the United States” (56), and Habib takes measures to try to find and rescue Mariam. Starting sixth grade in his new school, Fadi is continuously plagued with guilt over Mariam’s loss and is tormented and beaten up by the two sixth-grade bullies.
However, though Anh, a new friend, he joins the photography club and becomes obsessed with a contest that could win him a ticket to India for a photo shoot but also take him in proximity to Pakistan where he can look for Mariam himself.
 
Then the events of September 11, 2001, occur and “By the end of the day, Fadi knew that the world as he knew it would never be the same again.” (137). Harassment escalates both at school and in the community. “[Mr. Singh] was attacked because the men thought he was a Muslim since he wore a turban and beard. They blamed him for what happened on September eleventh.” (165)
 
When the Afghan students have had enough with the school bullies, they band together and confront the two boys, but having them cornered, decide, “We can’t beat them up. That would make us as bad as they are…. Beating them up won’t solve anything.” (232)
Meanwhile, while looking for a photograph that will capture “all the key elements” of a winning photograph and additionally portray his community, Fadi shoots the picture which, in an unusual way, leads to finding Mariam.
 
In Shooting Kabul, readers meet one family of refugees living in a community of Afghans of different ethnic groups as well as immigrants from other countries. The story also takes readers through some of the background of the Taliban in Afghanistan, relevant at this time. 
​

23. Alyssa Bermudez. Big Apple Diaries 
 
Big Apple Diaries is based on the author’s actual journals which she has illustrated as a graphic diary memoir encompassing the time from September 2000 to June 2002.
 
Alyssa Bermudez was the child of divorced parents, dividing her time between her Puerto Rican father who lived in Manhattan and her Italian-British mother who lived in Queens. This diary begins in 7th grade where “It seems that suddenly every grade you get and everything you do matters…. Now our friends are obsessed with who has a crush on who. And who is the coolest. There is all of this pressure to be popular and smart or face a dim future being a weirdo with no job.” (10)
 
Alyssa is not particularly popular, but not particularly unpopular either, has a much older half-brother and two best friends, Lucy and Carmen, and is an artist who wants to become a shoe designer. In this 7th grade year, she experiences her first crush—Alejandro from Columbia. Her diary takes us through the typical middle school year familiar to most of our adolescent readers. “Yesterday I did something very stupid. I knew it was stupid at the time and I still did it anyway. It’s like the drive to be popular makes me see things through stupid lenses.” (83) Typical preteen, she does many “stupid things”: shave her eyebrows, accidently dye her hair orange, cut school.
 
Two months before her thirteenth birthday, the attacks of September 11th occur. Alyssa’s mother worked in a building that faced the Twin Towers. She escaped and caught the last train to Queens. Her father did work in the World Trade Center but was meeting a client in Jersey City that morning (and bought skates to skate the 19.5 miles back to his Manhattan home). Overcome with emotion, Alyssa writes no entries for that day and the following few.
 
After that time Alyssa recognizes, “I sort of feel like I have no control over anything. I want to come back to the normal life I knew and the Twin Towers that I visited with Dad all the time.”(195) She finds herself changing, maturing: “When things can change in an instant, it’s hard to accept it. I want to make the right decisions and prove my worth. I want to be brave.” (211)
 
On her thirteenth birthday she begins to wonder “Who am I?” and begins thinking about her character and how she may want to change. Her diary takes the reader through graduation to a future where “Some things I’ll take with me and other things I will leave behind.” (274)
 
Big Apple Diaries, a graphic memoir of an NYC adolescent who experienced 9/11 as part of her middle grade years adds yet another perspective or dimension to the other novels in this 9/11 book collection.

​
9-11: The World’s Finest Comic Book Writers and Artists Tell Stories to Remember. DC Comics, 2002.
 
The creative talent of DC Comics donated their time and work for this volume which tells the stories and shares the images of September 11, 2001, through 39 graphic stories that reveal diverse perspectives. This volume is dedicated to the victims of the September 11th attacks, their families, and the heroes who supported and supplied aid. All profits are to be contributed to 9-11 charitable funds. The book is a celebration of heroes and a memorial to victims.
 
Story contributors include writers and artists who will be well-known to comic fans and graphic readers, such as Will Eisner, one of the pioneers of American comic books and graphic novels; Stan Lee, primary creative leader of Marvel Comics; and Neil Gaiman, New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty books.
 
Divided into five sections: “Nightmares,” “Heroes,” “Recollections,” “Unity,” and “Dreams,” the  diversity of stories and artwork will appeal to a variety of YA readers. There are integration of the DC heroes throughout. Readers can select the stories and artwork that speak to them. As with most anthologies, the quality and appeal of the stories and the work vary. Many are well executed and moving, others are weaker; some portray complicated emotions, and others lack depth; some may be triggering, others may not connect the reader to the events. Some are may come across as more political than others.
 
One of the first graphics, “Wake Up,” relates the story of a young boy who dreams of his mother, a NYC police officer who lost her life. He wakes up, “doing what Mom said, standing tall because I want the bad guys to know…I’m not broken. My heart is unbreakable.” (23)
 
In the Unity section, in the story “For Art’s Sake” a comic book artist struggles with the value of his profession after witnessing the fall of the Trade Center. He tells his father, also an illustrator, “Don’t you feel a little guilty? Because we’re sitting here telling meaningless stories about imaginary heroes while out there, hundreds of real heroes are dead.…All comic books, all art for that matter! Painting, movies, tv…it all seems so frivolous, you know?”” (121-2) His father counsels him, “Listen, I’m not saying artists are near as brave as the men or women who ran into those buildings. We’re not. But we do have a role to play. We answered a calling just like they did.…We help our country cope with tragedies like this one. We make people think, we help them laugh again, or maybe we just give ‘em a place to escape for a little while.” (124)
 
I would recommend this book to readers who are engaged by graphics, are open to a range of interpretations of events, and already have some knowledge of the events of 9/11.

                                                                                                *              *                     *’

An effective way to begin and supplement the study of the events of 9/11 for all grade levels is through reading picture books. Here are a few examples:
 
Curtis, A.B. The Little Chapel That Stood. Oldcastle Publishing, 2005.
Davis, Amanada. 30,000 Stitches: The Inspiring Story of the National 9/11 Flag. Worthy Kids, 2021.
Deedy, Carmen Agra. 14 Cows for America. Peachtree Publishing Company, 2009.
Fagan, Honor Crowther. The Man in the Red Bandana. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013.
Gerstein, Mordicai. The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. Scholastic, Inc., 2001.
Kalman, Maira. Fireboat: The Heroic Adventures of John J. Harvey. G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2002.

A middle school and high school teacher for twenty years, Lesley Roessing was the Founding Director of the Coastal Savannah Writing Project at Georgia Southern University (formerly Armstrong State University) where she was also a Senior Lecturer in the College of Education. In 2018-19 she served as a Literacy Consultant with a K-8 school. Lesley served as past editor of Connections, the award-winning journal of the Georgia Council of Teachers of English. As a columnist for AMLE Magazine, she shared before, during, and after-reading response strategies across the curriculum through ten “Writing to Learn” columns. She now works independently, writing, providing professional development in literacy to schools, and visiting classrooms to facilitate reading and writing lessons. She can be contacted at lesleyroessing@gmail.com or through Facebook Messenger.
 
Lesley is the author of

• Bridging the Gap: Reading Critically & Writing Meaningfully to Get to the Core 
• Comma Quest: The Rules They Followed. The Sentences They Saved 
• No More “Us” & “Them: Classroom Lessons and Activities to Promote Peer Respect 
• The Write to Read: Response Journals That Increase Comprehension
• Talking Texts: A Teachers’ Guide to Book Clubs across the Curriculum
• and has contributed chapters to
  • Young Adult Literature in a Digital World: Textual Engagement though Visual Literacy
  • Queer Adolescent Literature as a Complement to the English Language Arts Curriculum
  • Story Frames for Teaching Literacy: Enhancing Student Learning through the Power of Storytelling
  • ​Fostering Mental Health Literacy through Adolescent Literature
    

Until next time.

​More than Sick Lit: Representations of Chronic Illness in YAL

Health is on many of our minds a lot these days, as we navigate life during a global pandemic. Thinking back several years, long before the days of masks, vaccinations, and strong opinions about everything Covid-19-related, I rarely thought about my health. Sure, I occasionally had minor inconveniences like a headache or a cold, but I could generally go about my life without any major restrictions related to the use of my own body. In short, I didn’t think about my health, because I didn’t have to. And even though I grew up with a cousin with spina bifida, a mother with scoliosis, and a close friend with recurring health problems, I don’t recall spending a lot of time thinking about others’ health either. Everything changed when I had a child who was born with a chronic illness. 

As I struggled through the sleepless nights that are common for parents with any new baby, I thought a lot about what it meant that my daughter would never have a “normal” life. I also tried not to think about the fact that she will likely have a much shorter life than most. I started doing some research, and eventually, I sought out guidance and understanding from an old friend that had often provided support in my life - young adult literature! I was surprised to learn how common chronic illness is in general and how little it is represented in young adult literature.

Chronic Illness Touches Most of Our Lives

The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) defines chronic diseases as “conditions that last 1 year or more and require ongoing medical attention or limit activities of daily living or both.” They also note that “six in ten adults in the US have a chronic disease and four in ten adults have two or more” and that one in four children has a chronic disease. With so many diagnoses of chronic illness documented, it is likely that most of us will experience chronic illness ourselves, will have a loved one who has a chronic illness, or both.

Chronic Illness in YAL

There are only a small number of young adult books featuring protagonists with chronic illness, and that lack of representation can be problematic. In Bishop’s (1990) “Windows, Mirrors, and Sliding Glass Doors,” she states, “Books are sometimes windows, offering views of worlds that may be real or imagined, familiar or strange...When lighting conditions are just right, however, a window can also be a mirror. Literature transforms human experience and reflects it back to us, and in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience.” Readers experiencing chronic illness personally or in connection with a loved one need an opportunity to see their experiences reflected in the literature they read.

While the number of protagonists with chronic illness in YAL is small, spreading awareness and increasing conversation around this topic can help. To start the conversation, I would like to share with you a couple of popular YA texts featuring protagonists with chronic illness and a few texts that are less well-known:

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green

Hazel and Augustus are two teens battling different forms of cancer when they meet at a cancer support group. Each has their own challenges associated with their illness, including Hazel requiring oxygen support, and Augustus having lost one of his legs. They bond over their shared experiences with illness and their interest in books. As the two fall in love, they are constantly reminded of the possibility of death and its presence in their young lives. At the same time, their time together also emphasizes the importance of living each day to the fullest. This bestselling book was also made into a popular film by the same name. Readers may also be interested in this brief interview with author John Green as he discusses his book and the characters in it.
​

​Five Feet Apart by Rachael Lippincott

Stella, Poe, and Will are three teenagers with cystic fibrosis (CF) who are patients in the same hospital where they are undergoing treatment for various complications from their chronic illness. Stella and Poe have been friends for years as they spent their childhood in and out of the same hospital, only meeting Will for the first time at the start of the novel. A unique challenge of cystic fibrosis is that patients can pass bacteria to each other that is dangerous and potentially deadly for other CF patients. As Stella and Will begin to fall for each other, they defy the rules to remain at least 6 feet apart, stealing back one foot of that distance after having so much stolen from them by CF. This bestseller is based on a screenplay for a film by the same name. While CF is an illness that can vary wildly from patient to patient, Five Feet Apart sheds light on the meticulous daily care required to manage the symptoms of this chronic illness.

The Memory Book by Lara Avery

Win the national debate tournament, graduate as valedictorian, go off to college and become a successful lawyer. These goals are all within reach for Sammie McCoy, who has every detail of her life planned out. Sammie refuses to settle for anything less, even when she is diagnosed with Niemann Pick Disease Type C (NPC), a rare genetic disorder that will eventually steal her memory and then her life. As disease interferes with her plans and she begins to experience symptoms of memory loss, she starts to record her memories in a book for her future self so she can remember the most important parts of her life. When things begin to change for Sammie, she learns more about herself and who and what are most important. Sammie’s story brings attention to this rare disease and to the experience of a teen coming to terms with their development of chronic, terminal illness.

​Lycanthropy and Other Chronic Illnesses by Kristen O’Neal

This new adult novel introduces readers to Priya, who became ill and was diagnosed with Lyme disease while studying at Stanford. Leaving school to move home to New Jersey and continuing to feel sick starts to wear on her, and her friends at Stanford have moved on without her. She relies on her online friend, Brigid, and an online support group of other young adults suffering from various chronic illnesses and disabilities. The story takes an interesting turn when Priya meets Brigid in real life and learns that her “chronic illness” is lycanthropy. While being a werewolf is certainly different from the true chronic illnesses the other characters have, there are still similarities in Brigid’s experiences that those with chronic illness may connect with. Priya and Brigid’s friendship and the chronic illness support group also highlight the importance of friendship on the sometimes lonely road of navigating chronic illness.

The Girl Who Wasn’t There by Penny Joelson

Kasia spends most of her time at home due to her condition: myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), also called Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS). She frequently watches the world through her window. While typically nothing happens, one day she believes she has witnessed a kidnapping. Uncertainty in what she saw leads her to pursue a girl she saw in the window across the street, who she later learns may not actually exist. As she searches for answers to this mystery, readers also get a thorough glimpse into what it is like for Kasia to live with ME. Author Penny Joelson lives with ME herself, and her first-hand perspective told through Kasia’s story aids in calling attention to the realities of living with ME in a way that anyone with chronic illness may be able to connect with.

Author Penny Joelson also wrote a personal essay for We Need Diverse Books in 2020 discussing her experiences with ME, why she had to write this book, and what teens living with ME shared with her about their own experiences.

I will continue to read and promote YA texts featuring protagonists with chronic illness, and I encourage you to check them out too. Additionally, for more information about support for students with chronic illness, visit the resources section of this CDC webpage.

Until next time.

There are so many great YA books available that you really don't have to settle for good.

The books you offer your students maybe shouldn't be a collection of the "best" books; instead, maybe it should be a collection of great books that meet the goals of the class. Do you want to cover the history of the classification? Are you interested in current trends in the field? Are you trying to focus on diverse texts in general or the do you want texts that are representative of the preservice teachers you are teaching and their future students? Are you trying to find a representative text from every literary genre? Do want your students to know about all of the major awards? 

Like most of those who teach YA literature, I have my favorites. Yet, I know I can't just teach only those books. They may not meet the needs of my students or the needs of their future students. Instead, I try to select a sprinkling of great books that attempt to answer the questions above. 

I try to cover a range of genres, a sampling of award winners, and books that provide a variety of diversity that provide windows, mirrors, and sliding doors (Sims Bishop). About two weeks into every class, I begin to think of books I wish I could include.

I have created webpages in the past for other classes. Here are links to some of those. You can see how things have changed and, how, they have stayed the same.
For my make believe class in 2018 
For 2019
For 2020

I felt that my last two classes were successful. At the same time there are myriad of things that I would change.

Below are my choices for this year. What would you add or subtract. When I have done this in the past, I have received many suggestions. Many have been books that I love and have used in the past. Occasionally, someone has an interesting suggestion or two. What are your suggestions? What have your students liked in the past? Like most of you I don't mind a fairly large "to be read next" stack.

For my choices, I tend to lean heavily on books that have nominated for or have won the National Book Award. Generally, I have included a few books from the early years of YA--The Outsiders, The Chocolate War, or The Contender. This year I am skipping over the history and the oldest book I am including is Taylor's Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry.

Instead, I am selecting award winners and books that represent the diversity of my students and of those they might be teaching in the future.

 Here is a list of the books that we will be using in my class.

Holes by Louis Sachar
Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang
New Kid by Jerry Craft
Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson
The Poet, X by Elizabeth Acevedo 
Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai
Realm of Possibility by David Levithan
March by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell
I’m Not Dying with You Tonight by Gilly Segal and Kimberly Jones
The Bridge Home by Padma Venkatraman
Patron Saints of Nothing by Randy Ribay
Hearts Unbroken by Cynthia Leitich Smith
If I Ever Get Out of Here by Eric Gansworth
To Build a Heart by Maria Padian
Dig. by A, S. King
The Last True Love Story by Brendan Kiely
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
​

In addition to this group of novels, the students will be selecting on of four by Chris Crutcher-- Stotan, Ironman, Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, or Period 8. It has been awhile since I have included a Crutcher novel. I felt it was time to revisit his work and discuss why he has such staying power.

I also have four days  when they have a choice within a genre -- a middle grades, a science fiction, a fantasy, and a work of nonfiction. They can select any work with in the genre, but I provide a smaller selection to help them. These options have been provided through the work of our University Teacher Development and Resource Library (TDRL). You can find link to recommendations in each genre at the class page here. 

The resources that have been provided in collaboration with the TDRL are fantastic. You find suggestion for graphic novels and tips for finding Children's Literature and YA within the TDLR. Hopefully, you work at an institution that has such a useful recource. I hope you take a few minutes to browse around.

Until next time.

Some of us wonder about computer assisted anything in the language arts classroom. Well, Tom can help you with that. In the decade or so that I have known Tom, he is always thinking way out ahead of the pack in terms of technology and the classroom. Early this summer we had a great conversation about this topic. Take a moment to see want Tom has to offer.

Understandably, I opened The Duke of Bannerman Prep by Katie A. Nelson in the shadow of The Great Gatsby. Nelson’s novel was heralded as a timely re-telling of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic, set on a debate team at a California private school. At the book’s start, I understood the comparison.
 
In Bannerman Prep, we meet high schooler Tanner McKay who has a beautiful cousin named Abby who is eyed by the larger-than-life Duke even though she is dating the witless Blake. In Great Gatsby, we meet Nick Caraway who has a beautiful cousin Daisy who is pursued by Gatsby even though she is married to the brutish Tom Buchanan. 

​

​As someone who develops instructional methods to help students and teachers use quantitative literary data to explore and enjoy literature, I naturally turned to the data to see if it supported the novels’ initial parallelism. (To explore the data, I used an online tool on my new blog and website Plotting Plots. Plotting Plots is a free site “for booklovers who like data” complete with graphing and search tools for popularly taught books as well as blog posts about data science and reading literature.) The novels seemed to run in parallel: A look at the word frequencies of both Gatsby and Nick as well as the Duke and Tanner reveal comparable usage. There is even a similar dip in the frequency of character pairings between Chapters 1 and 2, for instance. 

​But as I continued reading Nelson’s novel, I began huffing in objection to the book’s title. Whereas The Great Gatsby is actually about a mysterious man named Gatsby, The Duke of Bannerman Prep is less about the Duke than it is about the story’s narrator, Tanner McKay. Say what you want about Gatbsy’s narrator Nick Caraway, he mostly maintained a disciplined narrative distance from the titular character whose story he told.
 
What makes Bannerman Prep interesting to me, however, is how its author chose to diverge from the book’s literary inspiration, a departure that was most pronounced in the original novel’s central love triangle.
 
When I have taught Fitzgerald’s novel, I often focused on students examining Gatsby through his love triangle with Daisy and Tom. With this in mind, I fixated on how the sadistic Tom would appear in Nelson’s young adult adaptation. So I examined the literary data for the love triangle in both Great Gatsby and Bannerman Prep. Using tools freely available on my website Plotting Plots, I plotted the names Gatsby, Daisy, and Tom across each chapter in Fitzgerald’s novel. I then plotted the names Duke, Abby, and Blake in Nelson’s retelling. Here’s what I saw. 

​In the Gatsby data, we see how Tom’s and Daisy’s names appear with similar frequency at the beginning of the book, that they diverge as Fitzgerald develops their individual characters, and as Daisy rediscovers her feelings for Gatsby. Arguably, Chapter 7 is the most powerful part of the book, both quantitatively and narratively, where the car accident occurs and Tom gains the advantage he needs to precipitate Gatsby’s fall. And look: Tom’s name overwhelms the story in that chapter, doubtless because of his clandestine affair with Myrtle before her demise and successive manipulation of Myrtle’s husband George to commit murder.
 
In Bannerman, the love triangle data tells a very different story. In fact, there are only two chapters in which the name of Tom’s counterpart, Blake, appears more frequently than the Duke’s. The first is in Chapter 7 where Tanner, Abby, and Blake attend one of the Duke’s Gatsbyesque parties. (Abby abandons the ever-imbibing Blake to find time with the Duke; Tanner covers for her.) Then, in Chapter 15, when the love triangle converges at a dance club on New Year’s Eve. In both instances, Blake might yell and shout, but that’s it really. One could hardly call Blake guileful let alone murderous.
 
Exploring the literary data focused my attention on Blake in a way I hadn’t expected. In my original reading, I identified Blake as Nelson’s version of Tom Buchanan. But that isn’t true. When I read the data more closely, I saw that Blake never really achieves the quantitative dominance that Tom does. The name “Blake” spikes, but never overwhelms. When the frequency of his name usage fades at the end of the book, which Tom’s name does as well, it isn’t in the wake of any real cruelty. Just a fight. Blake is a one-dimensional grunting oaf whose presence serves as color but never a catalyst for real character development.
 
So in the adaptation, what happens to Tom’s viciousness? Does it just disappear?
 
Kind of. Nelson redistributes some of Tom Buchanan’s traits in Bannerman Prep, but not into a single character. Tom’s oafishness can be found in Blake. But Tom’s capacity for violence is bestowed on Tanner himself when he steals his brother’s painkillers to repay a debt and successively sends Sam to the hospital writhing in pain. Sam’s suffering is the apex of agony in Nelson’s novel. Like Tom’s responsibility in the death of Gatsby, Tanner’s culpability is indirect: Tanner didn’t directly cause Sam’s suffering, but his actions ensured it would ultimately come to pass.
 
From a pedagogical perspective, it is unfortunate that Tom’s twisted elitism, his loud insecurity, his repugnant racism, his forceful misogyny, and his barbaric brutality are sanitized in the modern adaptation. Today, students need opportunities to grapple with the complexity of individual greatness in society, whether that greatness is driven by love like Gatsby’s or hatred like Tom’s. Readers won’t, however, find occasion to grapple very much here. The Duke of Bannerman Prep is an enjoyable read, a good read even. But, for me, not as great as Gatsby.  

In an interview with Shirley M. Jordan in 1993, Rita Williams-Garcia said, “Well, I’ve already told my editor, ‘I will not be winning any Corettas.”  Of course, that prediction fortunately did not pan out. To date, she has actually won four “Corettas,” and several other major citations.

Williams-Garcia is probably best known for her Gaither Sisters Trilogy which was bound together in Gaither Sisters Trilogy Collection: One Crazy Summer, P.S. Be Eleven, Gone Crazy in Alabama (2018). One Crazy Summer, a New York Times bestseller, won several awards, including a Newbery Honor and the Scott O’Dell Award. It was also named a National Book Award finalist and a NAACP Image Award nominee. Its two Coretta Scott King Author Award winning companion novels, PS. Be Eleven (2013) and Gone Crazy in Alabama (2015), are equally lauded. With all of the excitement about these books and the publication of her latest books, A Sitting in St. James (2021), a 2021 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner set during slavery, and She Persisted: Florence Griffith Joyner (2021), a biography, it is easy to forget that Rita Williams-Garcia has been writing for young adults for over thirty years.

 With all of the excitement about these books and the publication of her latest books, A Sitting in St. James (2021), a 2021 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award winner set during slavery, and She Persisted: Florence Griffith Joyner (2021), a biography, it is easy to forget that Rita Williams-Garcia has been writing for young adults for over thirty years.

In 1993, while talking to Jordan, the critical reception of her earlier novels was not as enthusiastic as it has been for her recent work, but I think critics missed the significance of Williams-Garcia’s contributions to YA at that time. Two of her earlier novels in particular deserve a fresh look: Blue Tights (1988) and Like Sisters on the Homefront (1995), which did garner accolades (i.e., It was named a Coretta Scott King Honor book, and it was chosen as an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a Best of the Year book by ALA Booklist, School Library Journal, Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books, Horn Book, and Publishers Weekly.). 

Williams-Garcia says Blue Tights was originally titled Blue Tights, Big Butt and took nearly ten years to publish. The novel features fifteen-year-old Joyce Collins, who both seems in a hurry to grow up and pressured by society, including family members, to do so.  It doesn’t help that Joyce is unsure of herself despite being smart and a talented aspiring dancer. When her dance teacher points out that her voluptuous body type is not typical for ballet dancers, Joyce’s self-esteem plummets even further, and she begins to look for acceptance in relationships with her peers and older men before discovering her own worth, especially through her friendship with Gayle, the protagonist of Like Sisters on the Homefront, and through her participation in an Afrocentric dance troupe.

Like Sisters on the Homefront is 26 years old, but it is still timely, funny, and important. Protagonist, Gayle Whitaker has an abridged girlhood. At fourteen years old, she is a mother pregnant with her second child and forced to get an abortion. Hoping extended family will offer Gayle support and an understanding of who she is and where she comes from, her mother sends her to live with her aunt and uncle in Georgia. While there, she slowly changes, learns responsibility, and embraces her family, culture, and history.

​I like to think of Joyce and Gayle as precursors to Delphine, whose own childhood is shortened in a less severe way, as she tries to help take care of her younger sisters after their mother leaves the family. In Williams-Garcia’s capable hands, each girl whether, Joyce, Gayle, or Delphine, leans on family and community to find their way-- and to try to cling to the little bit of girlhood they have left. 

​References:
Jordan, S. M. Rita Williams-Garcia. (1993). In S. M. Jordan (Ed.), Broken silences: Interviews
with Black and White women writers (pp. 303-322). Rutgers. 

Until next time.

More than Just Setting: Reading and Writing Rural People and Places in YAL
by Dr. Chea Parton

If you read my guest blog on Ethical ELA, you know that I recently took a trip home to my folks’ farm in Indiana.

 Driving to the grocery store, to pick up takeout, to get my hair cut by a stylist that’s known me since I was knee-high to a grasshopper, to meet a friend for coffee, etc. – I was struck and amazed by how much changes and how much stays the same. It may be both a paradox and a cliché, but that doesn’t make it any less true. 

My sister and I have always joked that where we’re from is a geographical oddity (any O Brother Where Art Thou fans out there?) because it’s about 20 minutes from everywhere. In terms of the rural/remote spectrum, we’re definitely rural, having grown up on 80 acres with our closest neighbor a quarter mile away, but in terms of remoteness, we’re not that far from the nearest small city. On each of my trips into town, I found myself reliving other trips and the reasons for them. I could still name the families that used to live in the houses along the route I have always taken. The drive wasn’t only a physical and topographical journey – a journey in place, but it was also a mental journey through time and memories. 

Reflecting on this later, I remembered how my Grandma Jean would often have difficulty talking about where she grew up in East Tennessee, but as soon as we got down there, the stories started flowing from her like the Obey River she played in as a kid. They were all rooted and connected to the physicality of the place she was from and where they were formed. 

Even though I was both a rural student and teacher myself, I never thought much about it until I was working with rural out-migrant teachers (folks who left rural areas to settle in sub/urban ones) during my dissertation study. As I interviewed the teacher participants for my dissertation, I realized that who we were in our place-connected identities was inextricably tied to the way that we approached teaching literature – especially whether or not we knew about or chose to teach contemporary rural YAL. 

As I discuss in a previous publication, 

• Some of the teachers avoided contemporary rural YA in their own reading lives and classrooms because of the ways they have pushed back against and tried to escape the aspects of their rural upbringings and identities that they found untenable. 
  
• Others simply had difficulty locating or thinking of titles of contemporary YAL even though they had a few older texts.
  
• In general, they didn’t have many rural books and hadn’t thought about teaching rural YAL as integral to (or even part of) culturally sustaining pedagogy, and frankly, neither had I.
  

This had a profound impact on me. I started thinking about how this would’ve radically changed my approach to reading instruction if I were still in my role as a rural high school English teacher. I wondered what rural YA books are even out there and Googled in an effort to find them without much luck. The recently created Whippoorwill Award winners provided some ideas, but I knew there had to be more out there. 

In response to what I learned from the teachers in my study and its connections to my own learning and teaching, I started Literacy in Place as a way to bring awareness to the teaching of rural YAL and to provide a space where both secondary ELA teachers and teacher educators can find resources to support this teaching. ​
My work and the Literacy in Place website is built on three major principles: 

1. Rural stories are worth reading and worthy of study.
   
2. Rural stories are worth telling.
   
3. Rural cultures are worth sustaining, even in their imperfection. 
   

These three principles are addressed by specific sections of the website which I have designed to support teachers in their study and teaching of rural YAL which I detail in the next sections. (If you are a teacher educator and are interested in support and resources for preservice teachers, you can learn about that in my guest blog on Ethical ELA,.)

Rural Stories Are Worth Reading and Worthy of Study
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Because of the dominant deficit narratives and representations of rural people in popular culture and media (especially most recently around COVID and the election cycle) there are certain stereotypes that prove to be barriers in viewing rural experiences as worthy of reading/hearing/learning about. As a result, rural YAL with a critical lens is often missing from ELA curriculum (Petrone & Behrens, 2017; Parton & Godfrey, 2019) This is true across rural, suburban, and urban schools and classrooms. Even in my own rural education, I read very few titles that allowed me to see my rurality reflected in nuanced ways that rang true for me. 
In order to help teachers learn more about and see that rural experiences are worth exploring in the classroom,  I have created two main spaces where I analyze and discuss rural YAL: (1) my Reading Rural Goodreads account and (2) the Reading Rural YAL YouTube channel. In both of these spaces I detail aspects of rural YAL that spoke to me as a rural reader, the important perspectives they bring to critical thinking about people and their connections to places, and ways they could live in teachers’ classrooms. 
These spaces are in their infancy and will continue to grow – hopefully with the help of good folks like yourself, dear reader.

Rural Stories Are Worth Telling
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If rural stories are important to read, then we need to be telling them. Growing up, I always associated published authors with major cities. I never believed that a little podunk hayseed like me could be the next Suzanne Collins or Veronica Roth or <insert other big name here>. And if I did become a writer, I never in a million years thought I’d be writing about rural experiences. Who would want to read that? Turns out – I would and I do. I didn’t realize how powerful seeing yourself reflected back at you from the pages of a book could be until it happened to me long after I left the rural classroom as student and teacher. 
In order to emphasize that rural stories are worth telling, I started the (Non)Rural Voices blog. You may be asking why (Non)Rural. Well, because I wanted to be inclusive of rural out-migrant experiences. Scholars have written about and documented out-migration and rural brain-drain, but none of them have explored what happens to the leavers. Instead, they mostly consider what happens to the towns they left. It may be paradoxical, but it is possible to feel both rural and nonrural at the same time, and I want there to be space for those stories here. I envision (Non)Rural Voices to be a space where preservice and in-service teachers, teacher educators, and secondary students can have an authentic place to publish poetry, essays, short stories, etc. that capture their (non)rural experiences, further disrupting problematic notions of the rural as a monolith and illustrating the fact that rural stories are worth telling. 

No culture is perfect. That doesn’t mean that we should get rid of them all. Instead, we should prune to preserve. We should do better once we know better. And in order to do that, we have to look critically at those cultures in our own experiences and through literature. 
It is my hope that Literacy in Place and the books, reviews, book talks, and blog posts detailing the lives, experiences, and cultures of (non)rural people can help us do just that. ​

This Is a Collaborative Effort

I would love for all of these endeavors to be community-building and collaborative. 
Want your students to read rural YAL and write Goodreads reviews? Let me know, and let’s publish them to the Reading Rural Goodreads account (giving them credit, of course). 
Want your students to give book talks on rural YAL, reach out and let’s put them up on the Reading Rural YAL YouTube page. 
Do you and/or your students have (non)rural stories to tell? Let’s work together to publish them as part of (Non)Rural Voices. 
Would you like someone to come talk to your secondary or teacher ed class about rural YAL and/or teaching? I’d be happy to. Please reach out.
Have another idea you think would be helpful to teachers wanting to teach rural YAL, I’d love to hear it. 
For all of these and any other inquiries, you can contact me here. For more updates about the goings on of the Literacy In Place website, follow me on Twitter: @readingrural. 

Until next time.

I have been traveling. A couple of times a day I check Facebook and see if there is any crucial email I have to attend to right away. My wife and I just finished a six week car journey. We saw family -especially grandkids and stopped at various places to golf. Happily, my golf game got a bit better. I haven't been reading as much as I should have been. I will be in a better reading routine now that I am home again. Thank goodness that Gretchen Rumohr has been helping with posts and weekend picks.

I have also noticed several authors who books coming out soon. Thankfully, a few of those in ARC form were waiting for me when I got home.
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​Anyone who has followed me on Facebook or Twitter knows I love the work of Jeff Zentner.  In fact, I think I have written reviews and/or articles about every one of his books.  I received the ARC for this book back in December and was nearly finished when my mother was hospitalized and fighting for her life.  With the stress of COVID and my mother’s eventual death, the book was sadly set to the side.
 
When I was finally back in the right “head space” again, I could not wait to finish Zentner’s book.  As I have expressed in previous Weekend Pick posts, I read to feel connected to others and to understand others’ lives of which I might not be exposed otherwise. I read to challenge my own thinking. And yes, this book checked all those boxes and actually added a positive outcome of reading I had never experienced before:  I read to heal. 

From the first page of In the Wild Light, I was in love with Cash Pruitt and felt at home in Zentner’s stunningly poetic writing and compelling development of characters, the two traits that keep me coming back to read more of his work.  Once I had my feet firmly replanted on the ground after the indescribable loss of my mother, I could not wait to get back to my friend, Cash.  I was shocked to find my ARC had expired, and I literally burst into tears.  Luckily, the author himself came to my rescue, and I was immediately comforted by returning to the pages of the book that transported me to the small Appalachian town of Sawyer, Tennessee.   
 
At the start of the novel, it is revealed that Cash has lost his mother to an opioid addiction and his Papaw is dying slowly from emphysema. Cash spends his summers mowing lawns and his one friend, Delaney Doyle, works at the Dairy Queen.  Luckily, these two found each other, as Delaney’s mother is in a downward spiral due to her drug use. The relationship between Cash and Delaney is heartwarming and real.  It reminded me of the importance of friendship during the darkest of times, and as the reader, I felt the love and strong connection between these two teens. 

Because of her dire circumstances with her mother, Delaney is determined to escape from Sawyer, and a scientific discovery (plus her incredible intellect and fiery redheaded spirit) gives her the opportunity of a full ride scholarship to an elite prep school in Connecticut. Because Delaney’s discovery is BIG (while with Cash on the Pigeon River, she discovers a mold that can eradicate bacteria), the prep school has agreed to allow her “assistant” Cash the opportunity to attend as well. Yet, Cash has the impossible decision of possibly leaving his grandparents, the two people who have stepped in to raise Cash after the loss of his mother or forego a free education at a prestigious school and lose Delaney, the one friend and person who understands him.

​What makes this Zentner book the best yet is he couples his already masterful ability to tell an important story with a new twist: a character who finds peace in the power of poetry.  Cash begins to write about his love of Tennessee and those people in his life who matter most.  As a professor and Director of the Emerald Coast National Writing Project, this is the book I will be using as a mentor text to showcase how Zentner brilliantly weaves his spellbinding narrative with the poetry of the main character, Cash. 
 
In the Wild Light is a must read when it is released this October.  It hits the mark in all the ways that reading can be powerful and lifechanging.  My connection to Cash and Delaney will always be a part of me.  Additionally, I learned about the small-town living in an Appalachian town and was able to experience “seeing” the beauty in this part of our nation.  I was reminded of the struggles of people outside of myself:  the struggle of addiction and living in poverty are two reminders in this book that allowed me to have an understanding that I did not have before.  The relationships of the characters that Zentner so masterfully creates in this book makes this my favorite of his, which is difficult to say since I love all his work, but for me, the best part of this book was that it brought me peace and healing during the most difficult time in my life—a gift I was not aware reading could deliver.   I needed this book, and it arrived at just the right time.  Thanks, Jeff Zentner!

Until next time.

Little & Lion by Brandy Colbert (Little, Brown, and Company, 2017) puts a diverse twist on the coming of age story. Colbert explores themes of personal development in regards to sexuality, religion, and mental health through the heroine, Suzette. Suzette comes back home to Los Angeles for the summer, after having spent a year at a boarding school in Massachusetts. As she is exploring her sexuality with her roommate, away from her tolerant friends and family, Suzette faces some stigma at boarding school. She falls victim to derogatory slurs. She is also nervous to discuss her religion with her classmates who would not understand her faith. She had converted to Judaism after being introduced to it by her mother’s significant other, Saul, and his son, Lionel. Despite not being related by blood, Suzette has a strong connection to them and considers Lion to be her brother. This close relationship is tested upon her return, partly due to Lion’s mental health and partly due to Suzette’s personal feelings about Lion’s new girlfriend. Suzette was prompted to attend boarding school after Lion’s first hypomanic episode that led to the subsequent diagnosis of bipolar disorder. As Lion stops taking his medication and relies on his new relationship to seek happiness, Suzette considers discussing it with her parents but ultimately decides against it. The feeling she has for Lion’s new girlfriend, as well as her childhood friend Emil further complicates things for both Suzette and Lion. Not long after a big argument, Lion disappears and is found the next morning, seemingly having had a hypomanic episode. Suzette tells the family about how Lion had not been taking his medication and apologizes for keeping it a secret. Lion returns home and the siblings repair their bond. Suzette decides to go back to boarding school and confront herself as she opens up about her intersectional identities.​

What are some other good books for exploring intersectionality?
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Until next time.

About ten months ago, I was soliciting guest contributors for 2021. I shared a google document and had asked people to sign up on a first come basis. Thankfully, the slots where filling up. To my great joy, I noticed that Wanda Brooks had signed up for a spot. I have admired Wanda's work for a long time. We are thrilled to host Wanda and her colleague, Susan Browne. I hope you enjoy and appreciate their post.

As teacher educators responsible for English methods courses, we’ve always exposed our pre-service teachers to compelling and timely text sets/collections made up of middle grades and young adult novels. We hope these texts sets help them and us to better understand the times in which we are living. Certainly, in this era of so much uncertainty around Black life, we see an increased poignancy around the novels we select to to teach.
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The power within text sets as pedagogical tools was cemented for us while facilitating a book club several years ago (in 2015) with youth from Philadelphia who read the following collection: Zora & Me (by Victoria Bond & T.R. Simon), One Crazy Summer (by Rita Williams-Garcia) and Hush (by Jacqueline Woodson). We also taught ELA/English pedagogy via this text set to our pre-service teachers by using the lens of composite counter-stories. The three novels depict noteworthy personal, historic and sociopolitical moments when the Black female protagonists are first exposed to racialized violence. All the stories chronicle the killing of a Black male by a white man who is either a police officer or private citizen who takes the law into his own hands. We did not know at the time how impactful or prophetic our text collection would become. Unfortunately, as we started the final novel in mid-April, a 25-year-old young man named Freddie Gray was killed by police in Baltimore, MD. His death eventually deemed a homicide. https://newsone.com/playlist/black-men-boy-who-were-killed-by-police/item/87. 

Immediately following this incident, the youth in our book club made honest and difficult connections between the novels we were reading and the unfolding events not far away in Baltimore. Our pre-service teachers, likewise, asked tons of questions and shared developing insights about the text collection and the senseless death of a young man just a few years older than many of them. We never imagined, (6 years ago) that a relentless and continued succession of police involved killings would occur and incite an unpreceded uprising in the summer of 2020 for the sanctity of Black life.
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Since we created this initial text collection, countless other Black men, women and youth have lost their lives: Ahmaud Arbery, (randomly followed and shot while jogging), Breonna Taylor and Atatiana Jefferson (both shot by police within their own homes), and the now well-known George Floyd (callously kneed to death for the world to see) to name a few. More recently, we grieved the murders of Daunte Wright (victim of an accidental police misfire) and Walter Wright Jr. (shot while experiencing a mental health episode). (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/5/25/how-many-people-have-police-killed-since-george-floyd).  

Due to the past few years, our commitment to using text sets with pre-service teachers and middle/high school students definitely deepened and expanded. We’ve added several more recently published books to our collection that all depict police brutality and Black death such as:  Dear Martin (by Nic Stone), How it Went Down (by Kekla Magoon), All American Boys (by Jason Reynolds and Brendan Kiely), The Hate U Give (by Angie Thomas), The Day Tajon Got Shot (by the Teen Writers of Beacon House) and Tyler Johnson was Here (by Jay Coles).

As a composite and collective, these novels make visible a distinct pattern of antiblackness that exists as a form of violence against Black people not only in the past but currently. We anticipate that text sets comprised of these compelling novels will allow educators to carry out timely discussions about the hideous acts of racism that occur - day after day. And last, we hope that text sets with these sorts of novels might inspire ideas and depict lessons for today’s youth who, in the face of acts of hate, will resist, reimagine, and build the type of futures they desire for themselves.  If you want to read more about our efforts, please see the following articles or feel free to reach out to either of us via the comment feature or through the contact information at our universities.

References:
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Brooks, W. & Browne, S. & Meirson, T. (2018). Reading, sharing and experiencing literary/lived narratives about contemporary racism. Urban Education. https://doi.org/10.1177/0042085918789733 

Tulino, D., Krishnamurthy, S. & Browne, S. (2019). Resisting anti-blackness through counternarratives. English Journal, 109(2), 32-38.

Until next time.