Ground Zero Literary Elements

Historical Fiction; Young Adult Fiction

The novel's alternating chapters are set in New York City on September 11, 2001 and the mountains of northeastern Afghanistan on September 11, 2019.

The novel is narrated by an unnamed third-person limited-omniscient narrator. The 2001 chapters are from Brandon's point of view; the 2019 chapters are from Reshmina's point of view.

The tone is suspenseful and bleak; the mood is tragic.

The book's two protagonists are Brandon and Reshmina. Brandon's primary antagonist is his father; Reshmina's antagonists include Pasoon, Mor, and Taz.

Brandon's major conflict is that he longs to reach his father on the 107th floor of the North Tower even though a hijacked plane has taken out several floors between them. Reshmina's major conflict is that she hopes to protect her family and community after her twin brother tells the Taliban they are harboring an American.

Brandon's storyline reaches its climax when he escapes the North Tower only to see it collapse with his father inside. Reshmina's storyline reaches its climax when she watches powerlessly as the Americans destroy her home with a missile.

When Port Authority officers usher evacuees into the underground mall beneath the Twin Towers, a policewoman tells a worried man that the building is made of steel and therefore can't collapse. Her statement foreshadows the imminent and unexpected collapse of both the South and North Towers.

When Brandon and Richard are evacuating through the mall beneath the Twin Towers, Brandon sees a store with phones and suggests he could try calling his father again. In an example of verbal understatement, Richard replies, “Not exactly the best place to stop,” while squinting up into the water coming down from the sprinklers. Richard's casual language undersells the emergency of needing to get outside and to safety.

The pair of Wolverine claws Brandon wants to buy from the Sam Goody store is an allusion to the Marvel X-Men character Wolverine, who is known for his trademark adamantine claws.

In the opening chapter, Gratz uses visual imagery to establish the setting in which Brandon's storyline takes place: “The gray, rectangular Twin Towers stood more than twice as tall as the other skyscrapers around them at the southern end of Manhattan. The two towers were almost identical, except for the huge red-and-white antenna on the roof of the North Tower.”

When Reshmina steals Pasoon's airplane toy, he commands her to give it back to him, saying, “You’re just a girl! You have to do what I tell you!” Reshmina's response is a paradox, with Gratz writing: "'I’m not a girl, I’m your sister,' Reshmina shot back, which somehow made sense."

With its alternating storylines, the novel contains several instances of parallel events. For instance, in the opening chapters, Brandon rides the subway and sees the Twin Towers against the blue sky, while Reshmina looks up to see a “towering mountain range” against a cloudless blue sky. Another parallel occurs when Brandon crawls on a ledge of the exposed side of the North Tower and sees a helicopter draws level with him; in her storyline, Reshmina clings to a cliff as an Apache helicopter pilot decides whether to shoot her and Pasoon. A third instance is when Gratz contrasts Brandon and Richard crowding into the underground mall beneath the World Trade center with Reshmina, Taz, and the villagers squeezing into the ancient caves beneath Reshmina's village.

When the North Tower collapses, Gratz writes: "The gray cloud from the tower expanded out, out, out, and then the cloud of dust and rock and glass came blasting across the plaza and down the narrow streets between Manhattan’s surviving skyscrapers like a living thing, coming to swallow Brandon. Like it had swallowed his father." In this passage, Gratz personifies the cloud of dust that was once the North Tower, writing of it as though it is a living being that swallowed Brandon's father.