Ground Zero

Ground Zero is a novel for younger readers by Alan Gratz, published in 2021. It tells two stories set on the same calendar date eighteen years apart and alternates between them from chapter to chapter.

In the first, Brandon is spending a day at his father's workplace on the 107th floor of the World Trade Center when a plane hits the tower above them and an ordinary morning becomes a fight to get out of a building that is coming down. In the second, Reshmina lives in an Afghan village where war has been part of daily life for longer than she can remember, and what she wants is an education and a future rather than a side in somebody else's battle. When fighting arrives in her village she has to decide whether to help an injured American soldier, knowing what that decision could cost her family.

Gratz keeps the two narratives in conversation, so the questions each child faces about survival, loyalty and the distance between an enemy and a stranger echo across the years between them. The novel is written for middle-grade readers and treats both the events of 11 September 2001 and a much later conflict in the same country.