Brandon "Taz" Lowery (Chavez)

Brandon Lowery is the most complicated character in the novel because unlike the other characters Brandon grows up. He learns. He changes. The novel records the long-term impact on 9/11. There is Brandon in 2001 and then Brandon, in the army Special Ops stationed in war-torn Afghanistan, some 19 years later. His childhood ended abruptly by the terrorist attacks, Brandon nurses a dark need for revenge and a certainty that Americans might would be justified in any expression anywhere. The experience with Reshmina, however, changes all that, and Brandon in the end emerges as the novel’s moral center as he learns to question the moral rightness of the American occupation of Afghanistan. The ordeal of 9/11 traumatizes young Brandon. The only reason he is accompanying his father to work on 9/11 is because he has been unjustly suspended from school for punching a bully who had stolen another kid...