Ground Zero

"Gone. One of the words that's hardest to fully comprehend. Gone."

-Claire

 

 

That dreadful feeling at that particular moment is preserved in this book. Mr. Levithan is right about his Author's Note. Time will pass by and what happened can be looked up in the internet through news portals but what he did is something worth recognizing for even though the characters are made up, the event and people's reactions are based on the reality that occurred.

"I approached it with much trepidation,...  and also by the fact that as time goes on, readers (especially younger ones) will have less and less firsthand experience of what it was like to be in New York in those hours and days and months...the experience of the day needs to be preserved with as much immediacy as we can give it."

As with the theme that's apparently common and widely used nowadays, this 2009 book is about the interaction of three people, about their lives which were intertwined, during and after 9/11. Jasper and Peter met at a party, Peter and Claire weren't close but are school mates, and Claire and Jasper tried to make sense of what happened.

 

When the World Trade Center, also known as Twin Towers, fell, I was just a kid. The horror didn't hit me that much until I was in college when I randomly felt the urge to check the details, or what I actually looked for - videos taken while it was happening.

The book is written in a first person point of view, with each of them narrating.
 

I like the realization of Jasper as he was picking up pieces of papers that came from the towers, that those papers are sad remembrance from those who were there.

'"Something as mundane as two sheets of paper from an office file could provide the final evidence of how vulnerable we are, how we live our lives not knowing how or when they will end. I had a sense of how if we truly understood how many of the unimportant things we do will end up outliving us, we'd never be able to go on."

I like the way Peter feels about music, that each one of them has a specific moment they can be played.

"So my headphones stay around my throat as I stumble away. I know if I press play, the song will never be able to work for me again, because instead of the song playing under the moment, the moment will weigh on top of the song, and I am never going to want to remember this, I am never going to want to be here again, so I walk without anyone else's words in my ears, and all the music falls away from the world, because how can you have music on a day like today?"

I like the hope Claire saw in humanity, that people seemed they became more united.

"Did it really take something of this magnitude to make us realize this? Yeah, I guess so."

After reading, you'll get to think that at whatever angle you look, in whatever situation it may be, love, the higher law, will help you get through it all.

 

Notable Ideas

 

Jasper
~"...I j just didn't want to deal with people. Even when I was around people, I didn't want to deal with them."

 

Peter
~But I guess the thing about fear is that it defies the laws of rationality. It creates its own laws instead.
~...it's pretty incredible to do something so concrete for total strangers...

 

Claire
~It's the thoughts. They will not go to sleep, so I cannot go to sleep.
~We just want to walk. Our legs need to move to keep our minds from collapsing.
~But I guess it's just as easy to get lost in the dealing as it is to get lost in the avoidance.