Master teen author and book editor David Levithan has crafted an amazing story of three teenagers living in New York as they experience the events and aftereffects of what happened on 9/11.

Claire is a 17 year old who lives blocks away from the World Trade Center. On the morning of the attacks, she is in school. She is worried that her mother, who works in another part of the island, might have been on the subway underneath. She goes across the street to the neighboring elementary school to see her brother and help with watching the kids as the administration waits for parents to come pick them up.

One of her schoolmates, Peter is at a local record store waiting to buy a new album. Music is incredibly important, and he is afraid to listen to any music for fear that whatever he hears will be tied to the horrible events in his memory.

The weekend before, Peter met Dylan, a boy preparing to heard off for his freshman year of college. At the party, they had arranged to have their first date that Tuesday evening, but how can anyone think of such things at times like this. Dylan is a Brooklynite who is currently alone as his parents have flown out to Korea to be with his dying grandmother.

The story is presented in all three voices in alternating chapters. Readers join them as they live through the experiences of that day. In fact, the readers stay with them until three years later when the invasion of Iraq. Through their shared perspectives and their innermost thoughts, it quickly becomes clear that they are all changed on various levels.

I found the book to be incredibly moving. It really captures the raw emotion (fear, horror, sense of community) that happened in the hours, days, and weeks that followed the terrorist attack. Levithan had set out to write a book for later generations who won't be able to remember what it was like to live through these events, and I think he has done so masterfully. In some ways, I found this to be a tough read as it opened up some of the trauma that I remember feeling at the time, but that is a clear sign that the novel does what he had hoped it would do.