Booklife Review

What It Cost Us is a poignant and powerful anthology that follows, through fiction, the experiences of minority students in high school and college in the DC metro area during the first year of COVID-19 pandemic. The stories are arranged linearly, with the first taking place just as the first wave of the virus shuts down the country. The opening stories examine those first few months where everything felt like a huge loss—missing family, friends, jobs, events, proms—and people found strength in small victories. As the book advances into summer and fall, these students face grief, as people they love are sick or dying, from the virus or from violence, at a time when communities faced increasing division and the murder of George Floyd brought urgent attention to issues of discrimination and policing.

What It Cost Us surveys an extraordinarily fractious stretch of American history, as the students write with fresh power about loss, about the failures of the system around them, and on how to decide when, how and where they should speak out. Then, just as the smallest sense of normality begins to creep into these writers’ lives, the students face the explosive events of January 6, 2021. “Just wait,” the prescient mother of one student declares. “The story of this day is going to be told very differently in different homes in the coming days.”

Through the lives of these ten young people, readers will be faced with a reminder of the burdens young people have borne, their struggle to have experiences validated, and the pain of coping with loss. From an immigrant desperately trying to live up to expectations who finds an ally, to the students with friendships seen in a new light amid protests and riots, to the young man questioning what he missed after losing a friend, each of these stories is a reminder of the resilience of those who hold the future in their hands.

Takeaway: Washington, D.C., students share their moving experiences of pandemic life and grief.

Great for fans of: Nancy S. Nelson’s Young People of the Pandemic, Ibi Zoboi’s Black Enough: Stories of Being Young & Black in America.

Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: B
Marketing copy: A