11 and Up

Alex Douglas always wanted to be a hero.

But nothing heroic ever happened to Alex. Nothing, that is, until his eleventh birthday.

Then everything changed.

When Alex rescues a stray dog as a birthday gift to himself, he doesn’t think his life can get much better. Radar, his new dog, pretty much feels the same way. But this day has bigger things in store for both of them.

I met the author, Tom Rogers, at a book reading at Barnes and Nobles. He talked about how 9/11 is a touchy subject and a lot of schools don’t talk about it for that reason. I sort of get that, the whole thing was just messed up. The planes, the deaths, the buildings disintegrating from the heat, it’s just beyond beyond. Yet schools teach kids about tons of terrifying events in history: The Holocaust, Pearl Harbor, the Civil War.

I found this Foxtrot comic that I think helps explain what I’m trying to say:

What this comic is trying to say is that it’s weird to be talking and learning about 9/11 since it happened so recently, unlike many things we learn about in history class that happened so long ago that they don’t feel real.

I got to talk to Tom Rogers after the reading, he was impressed that I noticed a small detail on the back of the book and he really liked my service dog, Dude. He even wanted to take a picture with Dude, me and himself.

Like I said before in my past review for ‘I Survived the Attacks of September 11^th, 2001’, I was in kindergarten when this happened, and my mom worked for the airlines, so my parents didn’t tell me what happened that day, so I wouldn’t be scared to fly. I didn’t find out about that day until I was much older. In the story, the parents didn’t tell their kids what was going on either as a way to protect them. In my defense, I didn’t really pay much attention to the world around me as a kid.

I don’t want to give away too much of what happens in the story. I will just say that there is nonstop action, is very well written and I just want to say that having your birthday on September 11 cannot be easy.

This weeks’ Weird but True Fact about an Amazing Dog

Roselle, a Seeing Eye dog, guided her master down 78 floors when the World Trade Center was attacked in 2001.