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Ingrained Preconceptions
When Songs of Children Filled the Air follows six lives on a collision course in an America consumed by post-9/11 fear, where one frightened teenager’s choice could either deepen the cycle of violence or interrupt it. What inspired you to imagine this particular alternate path for America after September 11?
I have honestly been surprised, pleasantly, that the fallout from 9/11 wasn’t more severe. Watching the towers fall, I expected something closer to the alternate history I created. Twenty-five years later, I wonder how we have grown, if we have grown, beyond learned and ingrained divisiveness. Beyond the high-level political and social impacts, I wanted to focus on the individual level and how the choices we make as a people are felt by the actual people.
How did you balance making Allison’s fear understandable while also showing how easily it hardens into prejudice?
When I write, I reach deep into myself and try to understand the human condition. Even the best of us are not immune to the societal “norms” surrounding us. I believe Allison’s blend of emotions and mixed reactions are completely human. It’s what she does with them that counts.
What research shaped your portrayal of Farid as both a Muslim American and an NYPD officer during a period of escalating distrust?
I have friends from Muslim backgrounds, some from countries of extremely limited freedoms. Being from Brooklyn myself, but not in New York on 9/11, I could relate to his situation. I have seen division between adjacent neighborhoods segregated by race and religion, and had friends involved in attacks for nothing more than walking down a street where they “didn’t belong.” I tried to make Farid somewhat sympathetic to the hatred he received, realizing that not everyone who is motivated by such powerfully ingrained preconceptions is themselves “evil.”
What do you hope readers take from the 2026 epilogue about the power and limits of individual acts of compassion?
Some readers might come away from Songs of Children feeling they are not powerless. We do not simply have to accept the world as it is, but even small acts can have impactful results. While these will not change the world, they can change a life, even if the only life affected is our own.
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On September 11, 2001, Allison’s husband dies in the North Tower. She survives only because a sleepless night made her late to her own office in the same complex. That accident of timing is the first of many that will bind her to a cable installer named Jake and a Muslim NYPD officer named Farid, as an America unrecognizable to any of them takes shape around them.
In this alternate history, the government’s response to the attacks does not stop at Afghanistan. It reaches into American cities, rounds up Muslim citizens into detainment camps, and eventually drops a nuclear bomb on a city called Bayt-al-Salam. Allison, Jake, and Farid form an unlikely household of survivors, hiding in a cemetery mansion and trying to protect two children from a country that has turned on itself.
A sixteen-year-old jihadist named Musa, smuggled from a training camp into the United States against his will, is moving toward them. He does not want to die. He does not want to kill. But the men who sent him are counting on him to do both.
Songs of Children opens at the moment of detonation and then steps back a full year to show how ordinary people on every side of an impossible conflict arrive at a single atrium in Philadelphia where one girl’s handwritten note may be the only thing that matters.
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