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Review of OUT OF DARKNESS

Cover art taken from http://www.teenlibrariantoolbox.com/2015/09/book-review-out-of-darkness-by-ashley-hope-perez/.
Naomi is a high school senior whose father died before she was born and whose mother died after giving birth to Naomi’s twin half-siblings, Beto and Cari. After being raised by their grandparents in San Antonio for the past decade, the twins’ father, Henry, finds Jesus and decides his family needs to live with him in East Texas. They are enrolled in the New London School for the 1936 school year, where Naomi endures taunts of the “dirty Mexican” variety; she puts up with this and many more indignities so that the twins (who can pass for white) will have the opportunities afforded by their state-of-the-art new school. Naomi finds solace in her friendship and budding romance with Wash, but they must keep their relationship secret because Wash is African-American. When tragedy strikes the school, a grief-stricken community looks for a scapegoat, and Naomi and Wash’s hopes for a future together are dashed.
“…the dead are not always right. The dead are not saints. But the dead are ours. We carry them with us like it’s our job. And maybe it is.” (p. 391)
Living in East Texas, the New London School explosion of March 18, 1937, has always held a morbid fascination for me, so I was eager to read this fictionalized account of the tragedy that claimed the lives of almost 300 students and teachers. Out of Darkness is powerful and compulsively readable, yet at the same time it is difficult to read because of the constant dread of all the bad things that you know are just around the corner. Because it is based on historical fact, you know from page one that things are going to end badly, but this book will leave you feeling like your soul has been ripped open. In addition to heartbreaking sexual abuse, it offers a vivid depiction of the ugly racism (both passive and active) that was typical of the era, and readers are able to get a taste of the very real fear and injustice that so many people lived with every day. It was a white man’s world to take what he wanted from, and nothing was more dangerous than a white man with nothing – the less he had, the more he felt the world owed him. Out of Darkness offers both a reminder of how far we’ve come as a society and how far we still need to go. It would be interesting to have students read this alongside a contemporary fiction account of racism (such as The Hate U Give) and compare the struggles faced by the characters.
“In researching this novel, I was struck by the many ways in which whole swaths of lived experience have been largely excluded from historical accounts, in part because certain communities were not deemed worthy of note in newspapers and other sources considered authoritative and reliable. These silences need to be amended; I hope my fiction gives readers an appetite for stories lived in the margins of spotlit scenes.” –from the Author’s Note
Learn more about the New London School explosion at http://nlsd.net/index2.html.

Pérez, A. H. (2015). Out of darkness. Minneapolis, MN: Carolrhoda Lab.

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