by Moe Zilla

Created on: February 13, 2009

"On That Day" is a children's book about September 11. Andrea Patel was a teacher - and a pastry chef, and a musician - living in Massachusetts when the two airplanes flew into the towers at the World Trade Center in New York. "The world stopped making sense to me," she writes in an author's note on the final page. "[T]he book became my attempt to make sense again of the world at a simpler level, with a preschooler's understanding."

Her pain is obvious, and yet she reaches for simple truths. She created tissue paper collages to illustrate her search for perspective. A yellow-and-orange ball represents the sun shining down on a smaller ball, our own planet. "The world is blue. The world is green. The world is bright. The world is very big, and really round, and pretty peaceful." The book presents a close-up of the colorful tissue paper ball, its deep blue bumping against clusters of green, with patches of white to represent clouds.

It's all simple, childlike and beautiful, but it's also an adult's drama - Andrea's fumbling for an understanding. "One day a terrible thing happened..." she writes. (And a big red splotch appears on the circle that is the earth.) "The world, which had been blue and green and bright and very big and really round and pretty peaceful, got badly hurt.

"Many people were injured. Many other people died. And everyone was sad."

She's dedicated the book "in memory of those who lost their lives on September 11, 2001," and all of its proceeds were donated to a September 11 charity. But Andrea is approaching an even more difficult message: How do you explain terrorism to a child? More tissue paper collages offer simplified versions of a tornado, an earthquake, and a fire - bad things that happen in nature. "But sometimes bad things happen because people act in mean ways and hurt each other on purpose," she writes. "That's what happened on that day, a day when it felt like the world broke."

There's a picture of the pieces of the world blowing away and drifting across the blank whiteness of the next page. Her dread and fear from that day are honestly acknowledged. ("This is scary, and hard to understand, even for grown-ups.") And then she asks a question for which an answer was desperately needed. "What we can do to make the world right again?"

The book is just 12 pages long, and illustrated solely with tissue paper collages. It was written to be "a book of hope for children," and it's powerful to think about Andrea's emotions as she wrote out her response to the day and the pain it caused. "When bad things happen, only a small piece of the world breaks, not the whole world," she writes, to herself and to her readers. "Goodness is in the world, and it's stronger than badness.

"You can help by sharing.... You can help by taking good care of the Earth."

"You can help by being kind to people."

"You can help by playing and laughing."

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