The pines stood out dark against the pinks and oranges creeping across the sky, and a breeze stirred around her. 'It was getting late, but time seemed to stretch like taffy. The writing is as lush and as beautiful as the landscape: They imagine a future together with the twins, free from persecution. She finds secret pleasure with Wash, an intelligent boy who is a senior at the all black school in a segregated town. Now Naomi must balance the demands of being the only Mexican-American at her high school with keeping house for her Caucasian stepfather, whom she despises.Ī sign at the town diner: 'No Negroes, Mexican or dogs.'īeautiful Naomi becomes the object of desire and of racial prejudice. When their Mexican-American mother died in childbirth seven years earlier, Naomi became the surrogate mother to the twins. In Out of Darkness seventeen-year-old Naomi moves with her half siblings to her stepfather's new home in an oil drilling settlement town. Following my review, the author explains why she chose to write this historical novel. Inspired by the most deadly school disaster in American history, this provocative novel gives voice to those whose voices were silenced and whose histories were unjustly revised. Pérez's third novel, Out of Darkness features a clandestine romance which dares to cross the racial divide of 1930's Texas. Her gritty sophomore novel, The Knife and The Butterfly, explored the consequences of gang violence. The author's work for Teach for America Corps inspired her debut novel, What Can't Wait. Includes a fascinating author's note detailing the process of research and writing about voices that have largely been excluded from historical accounts.If you haven't read a book by Ashley Hope Pérez, you are missing a unique and empowering voice in young adult fiction. Race, romance, and family converge in this riveting novel that transplants Romeo and Juliet to a bitterly segregated Texas town. Can their love survive both prejudice and tragedy?

Naomi and Wash dare to defy the rules, and the New London school explosion serves as a ticking time bomb in the background. But sometimes the attraction between two people is so powerful it breaks through even the most entrenched color lines. These teens know the town's divisive racism better than anyone. Description A dangerous forbidden romance rocks a Texan oil town in 1937, when segregation was a matter of life and death.Ī Top Ten Most Challenged Book of the Year

Out of darkness book perez