Towers Falling
Written and Narrated By: Jewell Parker Rhodes
Length: 4 hrs and 11 mins
Because shouldn’t we be a much bigger, more unified community? Let Deja tell the tale…
10-year old Deja doesn’t like History, doesn’t want to study it, doesn’t want to think about it. After all, she already has a lot on her plate, things with far more immediate meaning. Dad is unemployed; Mom works all the time to support the five members of the family; they were just evicted and are now living in a family shelter for the homeless. And now that she’s in a new school, starting the year like anyone else? Heck, she doesn’t feeeel like everyone else: If Miss Garcia makes her class write a What-I-Did-Over-Summer essay, what’s she supposed to write: My family got evicted?
So when Miss Garcia says the school is trying a new curriculum with integrated learning, hoping to make History come alive for students, telling them it’s the 15th Anniversary of something called September 11th, Deja is infuriated. Never heard of it; and how does that get food on their table; how does that get her dad to get off his backside and get a job?
But as the story progresses (and I liked that it progressed slowly, making revelations gradual and realizations believable), Deja starts seeing things that ARE personal. Her new friend, Sabine, is Muslim. And there’s a reason Sabine can’t talk about that day, can’t go certain places (Sabine sports a hijab—a stylin’ one, but still very noticeable on a 10-year old girl), not without crying. Her family was changed forever that day.
And why is Deja’s father, Pop, soooo freaked out that they’re studying the fall of the Towers? He gets almost violent, wants to pull her from school. His cough gets worse the more overwrought he gets, and now he’s really, really sick.
Through this story which, admirably, takes its time, we learn right along with Deja: September 11th happened to the whole world. (And by the way, this isn’t a story with only a Muslim friend—it’s all inclusive with her integrated class). We live in circles of belonging with our families being inside, and rings around showing friends, then schools or communities, cities, and on and on until we see that we’re all Americans (And for me? I’m thinking we’re all world citizens, but maybe I’m just a tad daft that way…).
Plus, there’s a reason Pop is so sick; there’s a reason he has nightmares. This is a loving and touching story.
Okay, now onto the narration. Oh. My. God! I really thought I was going to have to stop listening and do that thing where I chuck my phone at the wall. Because Ms. Rhodes, narrating her own work here, does this thing where she slams EVery SINgle FIRST SYLLable in each word which is ooooh sooo horrible. Plus, her voice sometimes screeches and cracks so that it sounds, right from the get-go, that Deja is a two-year old stomping her feet as she throws a temper tantrum. And, seriously, that’s how it goes for the entire book. The good thing is that Deja actually is pitching fits at the beginning (Gotta start somewhere on the character arc), and the story gets so engaging and damned-near-mesmerizing, that one gets used to the flow and adapts to it.
All in all, a really good listen, and one that brings back, well… not so good memories. I work with teenaged girls now, and they have zippo, nada, noooo memories of the day as they were barely born. They think the day should be a day for retail sales and such all.
September 11th was a horror show of a day, and I LOVE that this book shows that it was important enough to be remembered.
After all, through everything we’ve gone through as a country, everything we’re going through now: Aren’t we all plainly, simply, one country of people just trying to do the best we can?
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