Ground Zero

Alan Gratz's Ground Zero is a novel for 10 year olds that runs two stories side by side, eighteen years apart, on the same date in September.

What happens

Brandon is nine. He has been suspended for punching a boy who stole a friend's gloves, so instead of school he is going to work with his dad. His dad is a kitchen manager at a restaurant right at the top of the North Tower, 107 floors up. It is the 11th of September 2001.

Reshmina is eleven. She is in a village in the mountains of Afghanistan, collecting firewood before the two-kilometre walk to school, on the 11th of September 2019. She wants to be a teacher. Her brother Pasoon tells her no husband will ever allow it.

The chapters alternate, a few pages each, and they pull hard in opposite directions.

Brandon's half is fast and close and loud. Reshmina's is slower, and about a life where the war has simply always been there.

What makes it work is that both children are ordinary. Brandon is sulking about his dad being disappointed in him. Reshmina is annoyed that her twin gets to play while she hauls water. Then the day happens to them.

Before you decide, here is what is in it.

This is a serious book and it does not soften much. Brandon's mother died of cancer when he was four. Reshmina's eldest sister is dead, and Reshmina thinks about her with real grief. The book states plainly what the Taliban did to people, including massacres, public executions and girls sold into slavery. Later, Reshmina finds a wounded soldier.

None of it is gratuitous. It is written carefully and there is no relish in it. But a child who has never met 11 September as a subject will meet it here in full, from inside the building.

I would not hand this to a sensitive 10 year old and walk away. Read it alongside them, or slightly ahead of them, and expect questions about why any of it happened.

For a reader who is ready, it is one of the better books about war for this age, precisely because it refuses to tell them a comfortable version.

What to read next

If this one lands, Oranges in No Man's Land is in the library too. Ayesha is ten, her city has been cut in half by a civil war, and her grandmother needs a doctor on the wrong side of it.