On December 5, 2005, the 9/11 Commission issued its final report card on the government’s fulfillment of the recommendations issued in July 2004: one A, twelve Bs, nine Cs, twelve Ds, three Fs, and four incompletes.

Que, que! I was stunned to read that! Only one A! Twelve D’s! Three F’s! If it had me at school back in the day, I would have been scared to come home with a report card like that. My mom would have given me a hell of a chanclaso. I literally would have been grounded for life. My grandparents would have cried. But this isn’t a teenager’s report card, it’s our government’s.

I had meant to read the 9/11 report when it first came out, but was too busy trying to hold my life together at the time. I had lost my job right after 9/11 and had a hell of a time finding a new one, then I’d moved because I couldn’t afford my old place anymore. Moreover, my son was shipped off to the Middle East, my boyfriend was sent to Iraq, and my family was just struggling to re-establish our pre-9/11 sense of security.

Reading a 600-page report in the middle of it all seemed to make no sense. I retreated into the lovely and enchanted world of children’s literature. The tragedy of 9/11 and its repercussions on the world I lived in was too profound for me to do any more than scratch the surface.

Three years after the report came out, I still hadn’t read it. Life was back to normal (kind of) and I was busier than ever with writing, reviewing, helping out with the grandkids, working and just life in general. The 9/11 Report completely slipped my mind. Then I volunteered to be on a nominating panel for The Cybils in the graphic novel category, and one of the nominated books was The 9/11 Report, A Graphic Adaptation.