Review: Oskar Blows a Gasket by Claire Davis and Al Stewart

Title: Oskar Blows a Gasket

Authors: Claire Davis and Al Stewart

Length: 263 Pages

Category: New Adult, Contemporary

At a Glance: Oskar Blows a Gasket is a coming of age novel filled with all the pathos and humorous undercurrents of a John Hughes film. Or, all the humor with a healthy bit of pathos, depending on how you choose to see it.

Reviewed By: Lisa

Blurb: Oskar Braithwaite is bold, brash and gorgeous. Just ask him.

Armed with designer backpack full of make-up and retro music galore, Oskar sets off for college. And, with attitude even spikier than his heels, nothing is going to hold him back. Except maybe one thing…his past is shouting louder than the 80s songs he adores and it won’t be ignored. Behind the effervescence are secrets, lies and sadness. Try as he might, not even Oskar can hide forever, and one day it isn’t only pop icon Simon Le Bon who’s going to catch up.

Who is writing letters? And why is a spy secretly following?

Enter Bear, with dancing eyes and secrets of his own. Bear’s kindness sparkles brighter than Lycra leggings, and everyone knows Oskar loves shiny things. Like every prophecy, their fates seem inevitably linked. As the walls of Oskar’s defence crumble, Bear shows his hidden strength, but will it be enough to save them?

Find out in this far-out, zany tale of fame, first love and retro DJs.

Review: One distinction of Claire Davis and Al Stewart’s writing is that it’s often indistinct, and by that I mean to say that this duo is capable of creating an environment where it isn’t always clear in the beginning what’s real and what isn’t, in what time-period the story takes place, or even if one character is little more than a figment of the other’s imagination. From those esoteric revelations to the uncovering of their realities is the structure of the story, and Oskar Blows a Gasket follows this formula in the gradual evolution of its protagonists: where they came from, how they came to be where they are, and, more importantly, who they are beneath the public face they present to the world.

Oskar Braithwaite is a bit of a poser, which is a kinder, gentler way of stating that he lies—quite a lot. But, in his defense, it’s a mechanism he uses to keep people from getting too close to the real him. The nice bit of irony in this is that it runs counterintuitive to the attention he draws to himself, from the way he dresses to the stories he spins to his love for 80s music to his frequent emotional outbursts. The entirety of this new adult novel is based not only on the revelations Oskar allows us to see along the way but in his effort to reconcile his past with the smart and capable college student he’s become. Oskar has so much internalized hurt over the disintegration of his family that it presents outwardly as anger to the point where he often is malicious, even towards the people he might even like a little bit—despite the fact he can’t be bothered to call them by their given names. Davis and Stewart toe a delicate line between keeping Oskar empathetic to his audience and making him unlikable, but they always pull him back just in time to let us to embrace him for all the grief he’s suffered and in spite of the gasket-blowing.

The boy Oskar meets at the train station as they’re both on their way to school in North Wales is even more of a mystery than Oskar—we don’t even get verbal confirmation of his real name until late in the story, long after he and Oskar have begun a tentative relationship. Bear Grylls, as Oskar has dubbed him, is every bit as sweet as Oskar is prickly, and it’s Bear who can be credited a great deal with our ability to forgive Oskar when he says and does hurtful things he doesn’t mean, at the risk of Bear being a doormat at times. As was the case with my ability to empathize with Oskar, it was easy to empathize with Bear, too, the more that’s revealed about him.

A series of letters written by a boy to his absentee father fill in the narrative and build an extra layer of anguish for his abandonment while pulling on our heartstrings in a deliberate way. The passages are touching to the extreme and grow increasingly fraught in content as Gareth, the letter writer, sinks deeper into an abyss of hurt, anger, despair and, eventually, resignation. I found this such a clever way of accomplishing the exposition of the character and loved that by the time we catch up to him in the present, we see that Gareth and Oskar both are so much more resilient than they give themselves credit for.

Oskar Blows a Gasket is a coming of age novel filled with all the pathos and humorous undercurrents of a John Hughes film. Or, all the humor with a healthy bit of pathos, depending on how you choose to see it. I enjoyed this story and liked that the resolving of all the broken relationships came with a dose of pragmatic realism. It’s melodramatic at times, but so can teenagers and relationships be, so the drama fits both the tone of the story and the characterizations. In spite of his rough edges, Oskar is colorful, cheeky and not without his charms, and I appreciated his transformational moment in the end.

You can buy Oskar Blows a Gasket here:
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