This devotion to authenticity translates into contemporary meaning through the story’s characters and the complicated problems they face. I detect a massive amount of research behind it all. Threaded with lively detail, the historical richness comes through in social customs, daily activities, and the speech patterns and cultural attitudes typical of 1930s east Texas. It holds all the markers of a historical novel, starting with the cataclysmic explosion of 1937 that looms with ominous eventuality over the characters we come to care about. Lila Quintero Weaver: Ashley’s command of narrative is impressive! In Out of Darkness, she tells a story set in the American past and makes it feel of the moment. She also beautifully balances the swoony magic of falling deeply in love for the first time and the absolutely brutal realities faced by African-Americans and Mexicans at this time in history. Her writing made me think of a photographer who could both go wide and capture a panoramic view and then zoom in for a close up and not lose anything in this process.
The tension in Naomi’s home, school, and community is palpable throughout the story and increases slowly as we’re led into the heartbreaking climax.Īshley masterfully balances the big picture and the smallest details.
The fuse lit in that opening scene coils through the narrative, gaining in intensity as the story leads back to the explosion and then its aftermath. The novel opens with the explosion, and then flashes back to show how the characters’ live intersect before the event. One of the things I appreciate most was the slow burn of the narrative. I want to pull it apart and study it because it’s that good.
Rodriguez: As soon as I finished Ashley’s novel, I wanted to reread it as a writer.
And sometimes all it takes is an explosion.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.Ĭindy L. But there are some forces even the most determined color lines cannot resist. Naomi Smith and Wash Fullerton know about the lines in East Texas as well as anyone. DESCRIPTION OF THE BOOK: “This is East Texas, and there’s lines.
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