Generally speaking, a literary genre emerges gradually. The first texts reach a small readership just a few at a time. They require intervals in which other writers can discover them and then add their own contributions to the new aesthetic. It takes even longer for critics to begin acknowledging patterns in content or style that clearly distinguish them from earlier works. Yet the American 9/11 novel defied this evolutionary order; as the product of a historical event, it arrived with the event's same immediacy. Unlike other nascent genres, which might take years to be acknowledged as such, the 9/11 novel was instantly understood as a new generic frontier for writers to reckon with. It promised an opportunity – and, at times, an obligation – to put forth narratives that would shape our understanding of the next epoch in US and world history.

Given the rapid influx of literature, criticism, and (to a lesser extent) dissent that followed the terrorist attacks, it is perhaps a wonder that ten years later critics had still not produced a comprehensive assessment of the novels that deal with the subject. However, Birgit Däwes does not find this so surprising. She observes that despite the abundance of artistic and critical attention given to 9/11, scholars have not yet provided “systematic approaches, or comprehensive maps,” for evaluating 9/11 fiction, instead opting for “snapshots of a limited area” (51), which have perhaps allowed them to keep a respectful distance from a sensitive subject. Consequently, with the arrival of her Ground Zero Fiction, Däwes asserts that the time has come for critical attention to graduate from evaluating the historical and humanistic implications of these texts and begin judging them on their literary merits.

Early on, Däwes sets up her critical approach as a departure from the individualistic lens of trauma studies, which has dominated much 9/11 criticism thus far. Rather, she focusses on establishing a typology that allows for discussion of the genre at a wider level. For some, her approach may be refreshingly systematic. Däwes observes that as of late June 2011, at least 231 novels had been written about 9/11, 162 by US novelists, and her book seems to take into account nearly all, classifying them in one of six categories: metonymic, salvational, diagnostic, appropriative, symbolic, and writerly. Yet this practice is not merely an exercise in taxonomy, for these divisions all intend to guide “the analysis of literary themes, structures, and formal features [that] provide a broad foundation for insights into the particular aesthetic transformations of 9/11” (9), an intention that Däwes finds shockingly absent from other scholarship. Moreover, claiming that the “systematic inquiry into the literary responses to 9/11 benefits much more from a fundamental questioning of the boundary between fact (the unrepresentable original) and fiction (its narrative transformations)” (60–1), she adopts a new historicist agenda that prioritizes pubic consciousness over personal response; in other words, Däwes takes seriously the novel's potential not just to reflect but also to shape significantly the cultural memory, perceptions, and dominant beliefs that surround 9/11. This emphasis on the novel's transformative power is compelling because it acknowledges a need to explore the counternarratives – the alternative fictive approaches first called for by Don DeLillo weeks after the terrorist attacks – that were marginalized by the discourse of loss, recovery, victimization, patriotism, nationalism, and American exceptionalism that has prevailed since 9/11. Only the inclusion of these other stories or “truths,” including perspectives from outside the US, can form a truly democratic understanding of this event's historical and literary significance.

These points form the most compelling elements of Däwes's work. Unfortunately, due to the book's organization and focus, they are not exhaustively argued theses so much as justifications for her literary analysis. She spends the first quarter of her work laying out theoretical foundations and a strong literature review before following with thoughtful close readings of dozens upon dozens of novels, organized by her six categories. While this may prove the best way to structure a project this ambitious, it also makes her book fairly encyclopedic; a reader may be satisfied utilizing the index to identify sections that are relevant to one's research and skipping the rest. Moreover, its critiques of previous scholarship, such as the rejection of the trauma-studies approach for employing circular reasoning, leave plenty of room for elaboration.

Nevertheless, after such a vast analysis, no one can say that Däwes has failed to achieve her goal of providing the first account of a genre in its totality. She seems to have aptly seized this rare opportunity by establishing a new vocabulary and methodology for discussing 9/11 literature, and future scholarship would be at fault for not considering her central question of how the terrorist attacks impact novelists' textual strategies. Even more, however, her integrated approach serves as a reminder that considerations of global-historical contexts are becoming ever more imperative in making sense of literary production in the twenty-first century.