Something will have to change-but who will listen to a group of teens? That was even before the new regulations-it seems sometimes that the students are treated more like criminals. Moss can’t even escape at school-he and his friends are subject to the lack of funds and crumbling infrastructure at West Oakland High, as well as constant intimidation by the resource officer stationed in their halls. Ultimately, what readers will take away here is a realistic and unflinching attention to detail about a devastating situation.Moss Jeffries is many things-considerate student, devoted son, loyal friend and affectionate boyfriend, enthusiastic nerd.īut sometimes Moss still wishes he could be someone else-someone without panic attacks, someone whose father was still alive, someone who hadn’t become a rallying point for a community because of one horrible night.Īnd most of all, he wishes he didn’t feel so stuck. Nonetheless, conversations between Moss and his best friend, Esperanza, remain smart and refreshing throughout, and those with his mother are certainly tender in this novel that relies heavily on dialogue for its exposition.
While Moss himself derides much of this social outrage as "tragedy porn," trendy stories to be forgotten in time like his father's death, the book doesn't manage to effectively differentiate itself from just this approach in its extensive account of countless tragedies turned to peaceful protests turned to war zones, washed and repeated again. Yet when the boy Moss is dating gets murdered during a walk out at the high school, the real-life issues at hand, the novel struggles to balance the ironic juxtaposition between the Bay Area's progressive reputation and Oakland's longstanding legacy of combatting injustice with the sheer emotional labor of it all.
As Moss and his friends shift from depressed resignation to anger, Oshiro's novel asks both its characters and its readers what to do next. All of this becomes impossible as events at school-supposedly random locker searches turn violent, newly installed metal detectors injure a friend-reveal how hyper-policing has become endemic to Oakland's citizens of color. He starts his junior year at West Oakland High just wanting to heal, to see what'll come from the cute boy he met on the train, and maybe to start considering college.
suffers from panic attacks whenever he's reminded of his father's murder at the hands of police officers six years ago. In Oakland, California, sixteen-year-old Morris "Moss" Jeffries Jr.
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