Mark Oshiro’s Debut Anger Is A Gift Delivers A Powerful Punch

Oshiro’s debut continues and expands the conversation, taking it to new and interesting realms, by tackling both the main character’s queerness—refreshingly accepted, as this is not a coming out story—and his mental health issues in the form of both anxiety and post-traumatic stress from the shooting death of his father.
As you dig into Anger, there’s a lot going on. Set in the heart of West Oakland, California, a city struck by both poverty and gentrification, Anger follows teen Moss Jeffries, a nerdy, anxiety-stricken teen who’s just trying to keep his head above water as things in his heavily policed town (and school) come to a head. He’s already dealing with a lot: he lost his dad in an incident of police violence six years earlier, which leaves him a target for well-meaning invasions of privacy, and his already crumbling, severely underfunded school is surveilled by a violent cop, who subjects students to random locker searches with shattering brutality. And things are about to go from bad to worse, as the principal brings in metal detectors and other forms of oppression to “control” the kids.
Right from the start, we find ourselves in the thick of a blooming love story, between Moss and Javier, a boy he meets on the train. While Moss is gay and out, this is still his first real foray into the world of dating—and hooking up—and the anxiety and excitement as he swoons and fumbles is both charming and so very relatable.
What’s exciting to witness here is how—despite this being a story about gay kids of color falling in love—there is acceptance all around them. Moss’s mother knows her kid is gay and exploring, and she’s by his side as much or as little as he wants her to be, asking questions including the dreaded, “Do you have condoms?” His friends, too, reflect all the colors of the rainbow, and there are some very frank conversations about acceptance (especially for bi kids, and there is a nonbinary teen as well). The kids are at the center of the community in this book, as they strike back against the administration and police presence at their school, demanding better for themselves and those who will come after them.
The greater community of West Oakland is explored in profound ways, too. So often in black and brown communities, parent-child relationships are portrayed as fractured. But here, Oshiro purposefully takes the opposite track, revealing a truth rarely seen, one that centers acceptance and understanding. Moss may be a fatherless child, but he has father figures in the men at the barber shop, makeshift mentors, and a strong support network in the women he and his mom have come to rely on as family, including the lesbian parents of one of his friends, and other female friends who cook dinner as a family with them on a weekly basis. In a category where parents are so often left off the page, adults are ever-present in Anger: teachers who go above and beyond, mothers who carefully balance caring with overbearing, friends and mentors who know how critical this period is a kid’s development, who offer both a safety net and the freedom to reach.
That said: while there is so much positivity in these pages, Anger is not, well, without its anger. From page one it brims beneath the surface, lurking as fear and anxiety and trauma suppressed but hardly forgotten. And when an incident of violence rocks this community again, anger surfaces in its full brutality, and Oshiro’s take is unflinching and somewhat hard to watch, leaving the reader reeling.
But that, in the end, is the point, right? Unvarnished, unwavering, and resolute, Anger offers an emotion that must be embraced and truly felt. It busts wide open the continued conversation about police brutality and its very real effect on families—the loss of fathers and community members, the threat against black and brown and queer bodies. It digs into the idea of anger, and who is allowed to be angry. It’s not a book for the faint of heart, but it is a necessary story, and Oshiro delivers his powerful punch beautifully.
Anger Is a Gift hits shelves next week, but you can pre-order now.