The other thing that helped me overcome my own trauma related to working on Towers Falling-I cried most of the time while writing it-is that a professor friend of mine we gave early ARCs to was teaching the book to her class at a university. You could see his eyes getting big, him realizing that he could have lost his mom‑that he might never have been born. She said, “I survived,” and she had never told that story before to her son. She said that day, she was going to go to work, but something told her not to, and she didn’t. The mother was one of the flight attendants scheduled to work on the Boston plane that flew into the towers. The mother was sitting on the couch, next to her son, who was in the class. I was Zooming with a school in Connecticut. Why are you so adamant that children should be taught in school and at home about 9/11 by the time they reach their teens?

Teachers could teach about the Holocaust, but they could not bring themselves to teach about 9/11. I asked them if they were doing anything about the Holocaust. It was that sense that history is not so far past. What I discovered was that was very typical of parents, teachers, librarians who’d lived through it. When I presented my book in the school, the kids were so curious but lots of teachers were crying, they said they still didn’t want to teach it. They did not want to teach it, it was too much of a struggle for them. That school opened their arms to me and said, “Come and be with us.” They were very much like I was: traumatized by the 9/11 experience. They are our citizenry they are going to be charged with keeping our nation safe in the future.Īfterwards, I found out about a school in Brooklyn, right across the river they saw everything happen on 9/11. But then I thought to myself that children really deserve a safe space in which to talk about these events. Why don’t you write a book?” And I said no. My editor at the time, Liza Baker, said, “There are so many children who know nothing about 9/11. Writing about 9/11 was not my idea at all. What prompted you to write a book about 9/11 for children? PW spoke with Rhodes about the healing power of storytelling and what she wants children to take away from reading the book.

The middle grade novel has resonated with readers, selling, per the publisher, 170,000 copies in all formats to date.

In Towers Falling by Jewell Parker Rhodes (Little, Brown), set 15 years after 9/11, 10-year-old Dèja learns about the terrorist attack in school, not realizing its catastrophic impact on her own family.

Towers falling by jewell parker rhodes