What’s happening at home, you ask? Some pretty horrific stuff. She does make one girl friend, and a few of the neighbors are friendly, but even if she had a thousand friends, it wouldn’t erase what is happening at home. The girls hate her because she’s pretty and the boys just want to get in her pants. Her classmates are constantly whispering about her. Wash is the one saving grace in Naomi’s fairly unhappy life. The foursome quickly become friends, but keep their friendship secret, mainly getting together in wooded areas removed from the judging and gossiping eyes of others. African-American Wash, the siblings’ one friend, is no stranger to racism either. The children seem to pass as white, but Naomi faces the town’s ugly racism. Naomi, who is Mexican, and her biracial siblings are instructed by Henry not to speak Spanish.

Naomi and her twin siblings Beto and Cari are new to town, having recently been relocated from their San Antonio barrior to an oil-mining town by the twins’ father (and Naomi’s stepfather), Henry (their mother is dead). We leave this heart-wrenching and gruesome scene to jump back to September 1936. Sufficiently upset? Perez is just getting started. Let’s make it worse: bits of children’s bodies. No, check that-it manages to be worse than that: riddled with bits of bodies.

Did you need some time to adjust to how completely emotionally obliterating this book will be? Too bad-welcome to page one, where we are faced with the rubble of a recently exploded school littered with bodies. The novel begins in media res (you know-in the middle of things). Whatever else you’re reading can wait a day or two for you to read this instead. Go RIGHT NOW and order this book from your library or favorite bookstore. Don’t bookmark this review as some reminder. Don’t write it down on a list and then forget about it. But you need to figure out a way to find time to read this book as soon as possible. Our TBR lists are infinite scrolls and we’ll never even touch half of what we hope to read. 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. 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.

Out of darkness ashley