All We Have Left

May 30, 2016
The devastating events of 9/11 intertwine with the stories of Alia Susanto, a 16-year-old Muslim girl in Brooklyn, and Jesse McLaurin, a white 17-year-old who readers meet as she is spray-painting “terrorists go home” on the Islam Peace Center that is opening in her New York State town. In 2001, Alia explores her faith while dreaming of becoming a comic book author, culminating with a visit to the World Trade Center. In 2016, Jesse’s older brother, Travis, has been dead for 15 years; her family never learned why he was in one of the Twin Towers when they fell, and she feels helpless in the face of her parents’ enduring grief and anger. After the fallout from her act of vandalism, Jesse digs into what really happened to Travis, reaching some surprising and heartbreaking conclusions. Scenes of Alia and Travis attempting to escape the collapsing buildings are harrowing and realistic, highlighting bravery and courage against impossible odds. Mills (Positively Beautiful) movingly examines how easily pain can metastasize into hate, while demonstrating the power of compassion, hope, and forgiveness with equal force. Ages 13–up. Agent: Sarah Davies, Greenhouse Literary.

November 1, 2016
A 9/11 survival narrative, that of Muslim American teen Alia, alternates with teen Jesse's story, fifteen years later, of awakening, redemption, and healing. Alia, a talented comic-book artist grounded by her strict parents over a misunderstanding at school, has come to 1 World Trade Center to her father's office to beg him to reconsider: if she is grounded, she will miss attending a coveted art program. She runs into an enigmatic boy named Travis, and they form a close bond throughout their subsequent harrowing experience inside the north tower. In the present day, timid Jesse, whose older brother, Travis, died on 9/11, falls under the spell of a no-good new boyfriend and his graffiti crew and agrees to help tag the new Islam Peace Center in town with hateful rhetoric. The young women's stories converge as Jesse discovers there was much more to her brother's death than she realized. While the novel's message is overt, it is never clumsy, and Mills's narrative missionto portray the experiences of characters from very different backgrounds while bringing the horrific tragedy and its aftermath to life for contemporary teensis fully accomplished. This timely, ultimately hopeful story of love, courage, and human goodness when it matters most is a much-needed antidote to our era's Islamophobia, fear, and the tense political and social conditions that young people are surely internalizing. katrina hedeen

(Copyright 2016 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)