An absolute chilling, informative, and masterful novel. 

On 9/11/01 I was suppose to attend my first day of preschool. I grew up learning about this day but having only a sliver of knowledge of what actually went down the morning of and days after 9/11. As a child I wanted to stay away from learning too much because it terrified me. Even when bin Laden was killed during my last few weeks of 6th grade, I just knew that he was evil. I had no idea of the impact that day truly had on the US and the world. This book made me realize just how much my life has been shaped around this tragedy. 

It is almost unfathomable to think that 9/11 even happened at all. I grew up in a world of security, of metal detectors. I do not know the freedom once experienced by American citizens before 9/11 and that is okay with me. I frankly will be a lot less irritated going through TSA from now on. As I listened to this audio book, which I highly recommend because it has 45 narrators and a beautiful conversation at the end between the author and a narrator, I looked up photos and videos from that morning. I also watched 90 minutes of the Today Show coverage. I had to see what people saw on that day. 

The stories told in this book are staggering. I was most shocked by how little people in both towers and on the ground knew what had actually happened. So many people would come out of the rubble and ask where the buildings were. They could not even fathom that the towers had collapsed and that they survived it. There’s so many stories that just took my breath away, I could talk about it for hours.