![]() ![]() 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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