The novel re-contextualizes contemporary issues of race, providing a historical framework in a not-so-post-racial America. The characters cross color lines and navigate familial tensions and traumas. This historical context is foregrounded by the fictional love story between an African American boy and a Mexican American girl.

Out of Darkness is based on a true-events: In 1937, a natural gas explosion at a school in New London, Texas, killed nearly 300 students and teachers - one of the deadliest school disasters in U.S. She published Out of Darkness in 2015, a year that invoked a national conversation surrounding issues of race, environmental racism, racialized violence and police brutality.

Pérez - who is a comparative literature professor at The Ohio State University in addition to having authored three novels - centers her writing on Latin American narratives, making space for young Latino readers to see themselves in her work. history.This discussion with Ashley Hope Pérez is part of a series of interviews with - and essays by - authors who are finding their books being challenged and banned in the U.S.Īshley Hope Pérez is the author of the award-winning Out of Darkness, a young adult novel that has faced challenges and bans in the U.S. 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.

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