It’s hard for me to believe that it has been 8 years since 9/11. Like most everyone else that day, I will always remember where I was and how I felt (for the record, I was working at home and after hearing some rumblings over IM from colleagues at work, I turned on the TV around the time the second plane hit. How I felt is harder to describe.).
Eight years. What’s really amazing about that to me is that the teens that I write for today were only 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 back then. What do I remember from when I was that age? Honestly, not much. Just hazy memories. World events had a way of just passing right through my life back then.
Is it important for today’s teens to understand what 9/11 means to so many people? I think so. It was a cataclysmic event that touched people around the world. My husband and I traveled to Italy in September a year after 9/11 and everywhere we went, the Italians took time to remember with us when they found out we were American; 9/11 truly affected people around the world. It is part of our collective consciousness now.
David Levithan, an author who is also a New Yorker, has written a book called Love is the Higher Law. It’s about three different teens and what happens to them on that day, in the city that they all love. It’s also about what happens to them immediately afterward as their lives, formerly separate, become entwined. And about how they deal with things long term.
It’s a great book and you should read it. Not just to get a feeling for how 9/11 felt to a teenager that was there, but also because it’s a good story with real, believable characters (as per usual in David’s books).