Out of Darkness, happily, is not one of those books.Īll in all, I wouldn’t say I liked this book or that it was one of the best books I’ve read. Books that explicitly detail a rape but fade to black during consensual sex don’t help anyone, in my opinion. And more importantly, the author also portrays positive sexual experiences alongside the negative ones. Though such scenes are sometimes difficult to read, I always appreciate an author who tackles them head on, instead of skirting around the issue. Naomi experiences sexual abuse from her step-father and sex-related bullying from her white classmates (all Mexicans being dirty and promiscuous, after all). Just the sexual content alone had me impressed. This is, obviously, a YA book, but it isn’t one that treats its intended audience like idiots or people who must be shielded from realities. It added another layer to the repeated themes of societal pressure and bigotry that Out of Darkness deals with.Īnother thing I was impressed with was how mature Pérez was in dealing with subject matter.
My favorite character, though, was Naomi’s younger brother, Beto, whose conflict with his “feminine” nature and his aggressive white father’s expectations were subtly interwoven into the narrative. I was personally slow to warm up to both of these characters, but by the end I was pretty invested in their Happily Ever After. It is essentially a love story between a (relatively) well-off black boy, Wash, and an orphaned Mexican girl, Naomi. We can read the facts about disasters until we’re blue in the face, but when you turn it into a story with emotional appeal, it becomes that much more impactful.Īnd even without the explosion, this book tells an excellent story. What’s really remarkable about the novel, though, is how the author has taken a single tragedy and created a richly woven, dynamic story to give it a human angle. Interestingly, I hadn’t heard of it until picking up this book.
The explosion killed nearly 300 people and is the deadliest school disaster in US history. The historical backdrop for Out of Darkness is the 1937 school explosion in New London, Texas. Pleasant, light reading this book might not be, yet the story Pérez tells is nevertheless powerful and worth paying attention to. Tackling subjects like integrated families, discrimination, interracial romance, and domestic abuse, this isn’t a book for the faint of heart. A sign in the window of the local diner reads “No Negroes, Mexicans, or dogs”, and it sets the tone for the rest of Ashley Hope Pérez’s debut novel, Out of Darkness.
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