September brings us an annual…celebration? Rite of passage? Holy Day of Obligation? I refer to the first day of school, loved and loathed in probably equal measure. (And that’s just by the teachers.) See our list of great books that acknowledge this momentous occasion and the power of the school year to bring change.

This September also brings us to the twentieth anniversary of the tragic events of September 11, 2001 (see our Five Questions interview and accompanying section about remembering tragedies). It’s a day now regularly commemorated in children’s and YA books, among them two winners of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, Maira Kalman’s Fireboat and Mordicai Gerstein’s The Man Who Walked Between the Towers. I was on the subway on the way to the Horn Book when the towers were struck and did not know what had happened until I walked into the office to be greeted by my ashen-faced colleagues trying to get any news they could from the radio and our connection to an overwhelmed internet. We spent the day on lockdown in the office while fighter jets zoomed overhead, and never have I been so happy to have the Horn Bookers around me. May this twentieth anniversary find you among friends, too.

From the September 2021 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.