But as heartbreaking events unfold, the star-crossed lovers desperately hope that any light can penetrate the black smoke cloud of darkness spreading around them. Their beautifully detailed love story blossoms in the relative seclusion of the woods, where even stepfathers can't keep them apart. Pérez deftly weaves multiple perspectives―including Henry and 'the Gang,' the collective voice of the racist students―into her unflinchingly intense narrative, but the story ultimately belongs to Naomi and Wash. The siblings struggle to fit into the segregated oil town, where store signs boast 'No Negroes, Mexicans, or dogs.' The precocious twins read better than half the senior class, and dark-skinned Naomi is guilty of not only being Mexican, but also of being 'prettier than any girl in school.' Their one friend is Wash, a brilliant African-American senior from the black part of town. Now a born-again Christian, Henry struggles to atone for his sins. Naomi has begrudgingly left behind her abuelitos in San Antonio for a new life with her younger half siblings, twins, and their long-absent white father, Henry. The powerful story opens with the legendary school explosion in New London and then rewinds to September 1936. history.'A Mexican girl and a black boy begin an ill-fated love in the months leading up to a catastrophic 1937 school explosion in East Texas. The work resonates with fear, hope, love, and the importance of memory.Set against the backdrop of an actual historical event, Pérez.gives voice to many long-omitted facets of U.S. 'This book presents a range of human nature, from kindness and love to acts of racial and sexual violence. 'Pérez deftly weaves unflinchingly intense narrative.A powerful, layered tale of forbidden love in times of unrelenting racism.'―starred, Kirkus Reviews ' layered tale of color lines, love and struggle in an East Texas oil town is a pit-in-the-stomach family drama that goes down like it should, with pain and fascination, like a mix of sugary medicine and artisanal moonshine.'-The New York Times Book Review And the consequences can be explosive.Īshley Hope Pérez takes the facts of the 1937 New London school explosion-the worst school disaster in American history-as a backdrop for a riveting novel about segregation, love, family, and the forces that destroy people.

But sometimes the attraction between two people is so powerful it breaks through even the most entrenched color lines. Naomi Vargas and Wash Fuller know about the lines in East Texas as well as anyone.

Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez