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shellyhartner 's review for:
Towers Falling
by Jewell Parker Rhodes
I wanted to love this book so much more than I did. It starts with a good concept - to examine 9/11 and its significance through the eyes of children who did not live through it. But then it takes that concept and adds so many sub-topics that one has the distinct impression this was a book designed by committee: How did 9/11 affect the people who were there and their families? Did it affect people of different races differently? Does it mean the same thing to rich and poor people? How about homeless people? How do Muslim Americans feel about it? How about children of Americans who chose to join the military in response? Does it mean something different to New Yorkers and non-New Yorkers? And what is the right age to teach children about it anyway?
And perhaps that is where the story goes awry. It tries to do too much, answer too many carefully designed discussion questions, and spends too little time building a solid plot or developing interesting, believable characters. The children all act and think like mini adults who also happen to be educators. Everyone in the book speaks in odd sentence fragments that might have been believable as one character’s peculiar speech pattern, but are instead clearly poorly written dialog, since every character speaks exactly the same way. The Muslim character is only superficially Muslim and her Turkish mother dresses as though she were from the Gulf instead of Turkey. The plot is flat with no real conflict or meaningful revelations. The entire time you are reading you feel intensely what it means to break that oh-so-important rule of good writing -- to show instead of tell. It is very clear in this book that the author is telling us what 9/11 should mean to us as Americans.
I’m the parent of 2 children born after 9/11, one of whom is almost an adult. He and his peers have been told how significant 9/11 was since they entered school. None of them feels that significance, and I think that is natural. I’m not sure they should be encouraged to even try. We didn’t feel the significance of Vietnam in the way our parents did. Our parents didn’t feel the significance of WWII the way their parents did. Our grandparents only felt the significance of WWI perhaps when they found themselves in the midst of WWII. Time moves on. We move on. Kids need to be able to find the significance of 9/11 (or not find it) in their own way at their own pace without us adults trying to lead the discussion to the conclusions we wish for them to take away. I think there is value to sharing the story of what happened with them and discussing it with them, but a book like this which borders on propaganda isn't the right way to do it.
And perhaps that is where the story goes awry. It tries to do too much, answer too many carefully designed discussion questions, and spends too little time building a solid plot or developing interesting, believable characters. The children all act and think like mini adults who also happen to be educators. Everyone in the book speaks in odd sentence fragments that might have been believable as one character’s peculiar speech pattern, but are instead clearly poorly written dialog, since every character speaks exactly the same way. The Muslim character is only superficially Muslim and her Turkish mother dresses as though she were from the Gulf instead of Turkey. The plot is flat with no real conflict or meaningful revelations. The entire time you are reading you feel intensely what it means to break that oh-so-important rule of good writing -- to show instead of tell. It is very clear in this book that the author is telling us what 9/11 should mean to us as Americans.
I’m the parent of 2 children born after 9/11, one of whom is almost an adult. He and his peers have been told how significant 9/11 was since they entered school. None of them feels that significance, and I think that is natural. I’m not sure they should be encouraged to even try. We didn’t feel the significance of Vietnam in the way our parents did. Our parents didn’t feel the significance of WWII the way their parents did. Our grandparents only felt the significance of WWI perhaps when they found themselves in the midst of WWII. Time moves on. We move on. Kids need to be able to find the significance of 9/11 (or not find it) in their own way at their own pace without us adults trying to lead the discussion to the conclusions we wish for them to take away. I think there is value to sharing the story of what happened with them and discussing it with them, but a book like this which borders on propaganda isn't the right way to do it.