Alan Gratz Books

It begins like any other day for Brandon Chavez, a young boy with an ordinary sense of frustration. He’s mad at his father—their relationship strained over minor conflicts—but the chance to visit him at work in the North Tower seems harmless enough. The setting is New York City in the crisp light of...

From Ground Zero

Eighteen years later, the story shifts halfway across the world to Afghanistan. Reshmina, a young girl full of curiosity and ambition, lives in a mountain village that has long been caught between two forces—the American troops stationed nearby and the Taliban fighters seeking to reclaim control. Fo...

From Ground Zero

I began Josef Landau’s story in 1938 Berlin, a time when simply being Jewish could seal your fate. Josef is thirteen when soldiers burst into his family’s home and drag away his father, accusing him of defying Nazi edicts. This single act shatters his world. Months later, Kafkaesque bureaucracy ‘per...

From Refugee

Isabel Fernández’s story opens with music—a trumpet she plays on Havana’s streets, her artful way to earn food in the dwindling Cuban economy. It’s 1994, and Fidel Castro’s regime is collapsing into scarcity. Hunger stalks the island; fear of government informants silences even family conversations....

From Refugee

I began Akira’s story in California because the wildfire has become the perfect symbol of our planet’s fever. It starts small—a spark, a dry gust of wind, the whisper of flame through brittle grass—but it grows, unstoppable, until everything familiar is burning. Akira and her father are used to dry ...

From Two Degrees

Owen’s story begins at the top of the world, where the land meets the ice and the air is clean enough to sting. He and his friend George live in Churchill, Manitoba, a town famous for its polar bears. At first, the two boys treat the bears as distant wonders—majestic but safe, something to photograp...

From Two Degrees