Nora Raleigh Baskin’s “Nine, Ten” ­focuses on the lives of four kids in the days leading up to the attacks. The benefits of Baskin’s choice are clear: Since readers know that a tragedy is impending, there’s dramatic tension in reading about these otherwise ordinary lives. When ­Aimee fights with her mother, who “worked in finance, for a company called Cantor Fitzgerald,” a reader may feel dread for reasons Aimee can’t know.

Doing justice to four separate story threads in under 200 pages is a tall task, and fewer protagonists would have allowed more depth. But Baskin creates sharply defined, emotionally compelling characters in a few elegant words. Besides Aimee there’s Sergio, whose fury at his deadbeat father leads to his jumping a subway turnstile and meeting a first responder as a result; Will, who lives near the future crash site of Flight 93 and has just lost his father, straddling “an invisible wall between the world out there, where his father’s death wasn’t ever-present, and the world in here, where it always was”; and Naheed, who comes to realize that wearing her hijab in a culture that fears Muslims is “nothing less than a unifying act of faith and bravery.”

Daringly, Baskin saves the events of 9/11 for the last act, effectively ending her book with its inciting event. When the attacks finally occur, Baskin leaves the characters’ viewpoints to narrate the events dispassionately, starkly setting out facts of timing and numbers of dead. Doing so prevents any hint of sensationalism or manipulation, and puts the novel at a glossy remove. Though some might wonder if a calm and bloodless novel about 9/11 misses the point, its poise allows “Nine, Ten” to honor the emotional distance many kids today feel from the tragedy.

In one scene of Jewell Parker Rhodes’s powerful, cleareyed “Towers Falling,” 10-year-old Dèja huddles at a cafeteria table with her friends, secretly watching on a cellphone as people jump from a burning skyscraper. The video is 15 years old, but finally seeing the forbidden images hammers in the abstractions of a long-past tragedy. In their fifth-grade class, Miss Garcia shows a poster of Manhattan with two towers instead of one, and it takes them many minutes to realize the difference: The twin towers are “like teeth pulled.” Rhodes doesn’t assume her readers know the magnitude of 9/11; she walks them tenderly through it.