What It Cost Us: Stories of Pandemic & Protest in DC, by 10 young authors  from Shout Mouse Press, shares pandemic experiences as raw, expressive fiction.

These ten writers share their experiences and emotions from the early stages of the covid pandemic. The stories are organized by season, which highlights both the dramatic evolving of 2020 and how much young people can change through a year.

Each story is fictional, but also personal, reflecting the writer’s own background and experiences. This gives an authenticity to the stories and characters here, and a raw feeling around some of the emotions. At my work, I hear a lot about pandemic learning loss, usually with high drama and great anxiety around catching students up to state standards, but rarely about general pandemic losses. These stories explore missed milestones and the additional challenges the pandemic created.

The writer of What It Cost Us come from diverse backgrounds, which gives their characters diverse, interesting perspectives, and also highlights some of the universal aspects of lockdown and pandemic life. The individual stories explore relationship setbacks, mental health struggles exacerbated by the pandemic, protests against police brutality, and just the challenges of daily pandemic life for young people. The writing is  direct and expressive overall, even though the individual stories have different voices. The overall feel is something like a diary.

One theme found in almost all the stories is the young characters’ memory of our world before the pandemic, missing the old everyday life, and the growing awareness that some things won’t return to normal. I’ve taken my photo of the book with some of my in-person classroom activities, those small, once-mundane things I deeply missed in my years of all-Zoom teaching.

The stories in What It Cost Us highlight the intense and long-lasting effects pandemic, with a focus on young people in Washington, D.C., but with familiar themes for all of us. Through personal experience in the fictionalized narratives, the writers reflect on challenging times and invite readers to do the same. 

I received a copy of this novel through BookInfluencers. Opinions on my blog are always my own.