Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan

Two truths became clear to me soon after I started reading David Levithan's Love is the Higher Law. The first was how accurately and concisely Levithan was able to convey the gamut of emotions we all felt on and after September 11, 2001. The second was that his target YA audience would have been in elementary school that day.

From there, my thoughts jumped to the next most obvious truth: Levithan is telling a story that these readers don't yet know.

Sure, everyone knows what happened on September 11. And those kids, in first, second and third grades, certainly had their own impressions and their own stories (especially those that lived in New York City). But they couldn't have experienced the day with the full comprehension of how our country and its people would be irrevocably changed, nor with the capacity or opportunity to act.

As someone who watched the horror from 3,000 miles away, and then spent the next weeks glued to the television, I could relate to every emotional response of the three main characters. Levithan uses three people with very different personalities to convey the whole range of feelings over the course of that year, and I know that I felt them all. I could relate immediately and viscerally. To a young adult reader today, how much of this is new?

It's obvious that Levithan has meant to chronicle exactly these feelings, to set them down permanently so that we do not forget what it was like. Then those that follow can also understand, even if they hadn't even been born in 2001. I'm actually surprised that no one else has done this yet. It needed to be done. The voices of teens during the days following September 11th needed to be remembered.

We can overlook Levithan's two-dimensional characters and lack of real plot because this book is really a chronicle of our human reactions to an incomprehensible act. The romance and friendship that blossoms between the characters feels forced, and nothing really happens, but that's OK. Even Levithan's eventual point, something vague about love and friendship, is secondary to the importance of the real story: what we as a country felt on that terrible day eight years ago, and how we loved one another and moved into the new, changed future holding hands.

Love is the Higher Law by David Levithan