Moss’s feelings become even more insurmountable when he starts his sophomore year at his dilapidated, underfunded high school.

While traveling back from the mall with Esperanza, Moss meets Javier, a gay Latino undocumented immigrant, and the two hit it off they exchange numbers despite Moss having a panic attack at the train station when confronted with a demonstration against police brutality. As he battles panic attacks and heightened anxiety, he is supported by his mother, Wanda, and his close friendship group of queer and marginalized teenagers, especially his best friend Esperanza, a Puerto Rican immigrant with white adoptive parents. He struggles daily with the trauma of witnessing his father’s murder by police officers six years earlier in a case of mistaken identity. Moss is a gay Black teenager living in West Oakland. Agent: DongWon Song, Howard Morhaim Literary Agency.Written during the Trump presidency and a rise in the Black Lives Matter movement, Anger Is a Gift offers young readers a means to conceptualize their American experience and illuminate others’, as well as a lens through which to understand the various privileges (or, conversely, lack of agency) offered by their affinity groups. Oshiro deftly captures the simmering rage that ultimately transforms Moss from a quiet teenager to a committed activist against a brutal, menacing system. This event and several police assaults on students lead to organizing, with the community’s fear building to a crescendo in a planned walkout gone awry. In one improbable event that affects the story’s plausibility, a boy with metal pins in his knee suffers a severe injury as a result of being forced to walk through a school metal detector.

Yet violent incidents continue to threaten the community’s well-being. A warm, mutually respectful relationship with his mother, an extended network of friends of diverse genders, sexual orientations, and family makeup, and a budding romance with Javier, a cute Latino comic book artist, all indicate a hopeful future. Sixteen-year-old Moss Jeffries, a gay African-American student attending run-down West Oakland High School, has experienced panic attacks since police shot his father six years earlier. Oshiro, creator of the Mark Does Stuff website, takes readers on an emotional roller-coaster in this powerful and timely debut novel that conveys a community’s bitter experience living within a culture of white supremacy.

Anger is a gift by mark oshiro