Review By: Liz Geist
Published: 2025
Cover Art: Ray Shapell
Genre(s): Fiction, Young Adult Fiction, Poetry
Audience: Grades 9–12
Content Warnings: Death, Covid, slight violence
Goodreads Link: A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe
Summary:
A powerful collection of young voices sharing various experiences of life when COVID hit the world. Set in NYC, the stories are honest, emotional, and leave readers with a sense of resilience, love, and the strength of community told from a time when the world shut down.
Review:
“A Bird in the Air Means We Can Still Breathe” by Mahogany L. Browne is a powerful collection of interconnected stories and poems that take readers through experiences of New Yorkers during the pandemic. Through a range of diverse voices, we witness resilience, grief, loss, and hope during the unprecedented crisis of COVID-19. The stories are woven together in subtle ways. For example, a bodega clerk serves a nurse whose food is delivered by a 20-year-old now supporting herself and her younger sister after losing their parents to COVID. Each story stands on its own yet contributes to a bigger picture of how the pandemic affected lives across the city. The narratives touch on themes of heartache, financial struggle, and the death of loved ones.
This collection offered me a view into experiences very different from my own and made me reflect on how fortunate I was not to face personal loss during the pandemic. While I appreciated the diversity of voices and the realness of the stories, some narratives were hard to follow. There’s also a recurring “chorus” of two girls who transitioned between stories, though it wasn’t consistent, which might be confusing for some readers. I think students at my school could connect with this book and find comfort or solidarity in shared experiences, but it’s definitely not a light read. The connection between the title and the theme is that each character is marked by trauma from COVID, yet they push forward with resilience, offering a sense of hope that things can and will get better. Overall, this book made me reflect on my own experience during the pandemic. While I would not read it again, I can recognize the impact and value of these stories.
