The following edition was used for this study guide: Gratz, Alan. Ground Zero. Scholastic Press, 2021.

The novel covers in alternating chapters the stories of two characters, Brandon Chavez, a nine-year-old boy living in New York City in 2001, and Reshmina, an 11-year-old Afghan girl living near Asadabad in 2019.

It is 2001, a beautiful September Tuesday in Manhattan. Brandon Chavez is suspended from school for punching a bully who stole expensive Wolverine gloves from another student. He accompanies his father to the restaurant where his father works, The Windows of the World, on the 107th floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center complex. On the way into the Tower, Brandon helps a Black man trying to board an escalator while juggling three cups of coffee and his briefcase. While his father opens the restaurant, Brandon decides to take the elevator down to the underground mall and buy replacement Wolverine gloves to give the kid. In the elevator, Brandon feels a shudder before the car lurches precipitously. With Brandon’s help, the people get off just before it drops down the shaft. Brandon, unsure what has happened, decides to take the stairs up, to return to his father.

He does not get far before he smells smoke and sees large cracks in the stairwell sheetrock walls. He is stopped at the 89th floor landing—the stairwell is just huge broken pieces of sheetrock and exposed electrical wires opening out to the sky. As he tries to climb along a ledge to get to the opposite stairwell, Brandon gets dizzy and almost falls to his death when he is rescued by the man he helped earlier, whose name is Richard Lowery. The two head to Richard’s office on the 90th floor. From Richard’s office, Brandon calls his father who reassures him they are all waiting for helicopters to rescue them. Talking to his father, Brandon is stunned to see a plane fly deliberately into the South Tower. His father tells him he must get out of the building. Richard and Brandon begin the descent. On the 20th floor, they stop long enough to call Brandon’s father. His father talks to Richard. Before they hang up, his father tells Brandon to do something worth living for. Brandon and Richard continue to work their way downward until they get to the underground mall. Then Brandon feels the ground shudder overhead and then everything goes dark. He and Richard make their way to the exit, using the Warner Brothers Store to guide them out. Brandon impulsively grabs a stuffed animal of the Tasmanian Devil from the debris as a good luck token. When the two finally make their up and out, through the smoke and falling debris they see the South Tower is gone. Even as Brandon and Richard begin to run together, the North Tower comes down. Brandon knows his father is dead. Richard tells Brandon he can home with him. There, Brandon struggles to understand the news reports about the terrorists who had attacked the Towers.

It is September, 2019, in a west Afghan mountain town near Asadabad along the Pakistan border. 11- year-old Reshmina has never not known war. The fierce fighting between the Afghan National Army, supported by the Americans, and the Taliban insurgents who seek to return the country to a rigid Muslim theocracy has raged for close to 20 years. Two years earlier, Reshmina’s older sister had been killed when her wedding had been strafed by American drones dispatched under the mistaken assumption that wedding guests firing off rifles to celebrate were in fact a Taliban sniper nest. Her twin brother, Pasoon, never forgave the American infidels and vows to join the Taliban insurgency. Reshmina dreams of being more than the dutiful wife and mother that her Muslim culture demands her to be. She wants to teach. She is in fact teaching herself English. Without warning, Afghan and American troops swarm the village going door to door looking for a Taliban weapons cache. The rumor had been started by the Taliban itself who then ambush the government troops. After the fierce gunfight, Reshmina finds an American soldier wounded and left behind. She decides to help him although her compassion may put her family and her entire village at risk. He says his name is Taz. She leads the helpless soldier back to her home. When her brother finds out, he is livid and heads up to the mountains to tell the Taliban who hide out in caves. Desperate, Reshmina follows to head him off. She begs him not to tell the Taliban about the American soldier, that they will kill his entire family for harboring the American. Pasoon angrily reminds his sister that the Taliban not the Americans, are her people. He runs off into the hills. Reshmina returns to her village. The American soldier, disguised in a burqa, joins the family as they head to the caves under the village to hide before the Taliban arrives. As they leave, a gunfight between the Taliban and the government forces erupts.

In the confusion, Reshmina watches helplessly as an American missile destroys her family’s home. In the caves, there is an angry confrontation about the prolonged American occupation between Taz and the villagers. Explosions from overhead rock the caves. When the villagers finally emerge, the village is rubble. Taz, reunited with his outfit, moves about the shellshocked villagers offering them money to cover their losses. Reshmina tells him no money can restore their life. Taz tells her he understands loss, that as a child he lost his father in the 9-11 attacks in New York, that afterwards he was adopted by a man he met in the Towers that day. He tells her that he joined the army to help avenge the attack, but that now that mission had lost its purpose. He offers Reshmina help getting her into a program that would train her to be a UN interpreter. Reshmina declines and returns to her family and the rubble that is her village. Before he departs, he gifts her a worn stuffed animal of the cartoon character the Tasmanian Devil that he says has always brought him luck.