Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez

By Q on August 19, 2024

It's a Romeo and Juliet adaptation. But with racism. And then worse stuff. I'm not kidding.

Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Pérez follows two star-crossed lovers in East Texas in the Great Depression. In a similar vein to The Watchmen tv series fictionalizing the Tulsa Massacre, Out of Darkness fictionalizes a school explosion from a gas leak.

But like Titanic, knowing how it ends isn't really the point. The point is how you get there.

I can't say a ton without giving some things away, but I'll give my thoughts as best I can:

This was super depressing. Good. But super depressing.
But part of it's beauty was finding the happy moments in between the tragic ones. And this book is full of tragic moments.
The love story at the heart of it is fine. It's never really pulled me in, but the found family aspect had more pull in my opinion.
Did I mention it was depressing? I knew it would be based on the premise, but somehow the author found ways to twist the knife even more so.
Something this book does that I haven't seen a ton of is dealing with more nuance to racism than White vs. POC. Like The Kite Runner, it shows what the variety of bigotry can look like across multiple groups, in this case throwing Hispanic people into the mix.
There are some really well-done elements and misdirects that keep the book fresh. Some things you can kind of see coming, but somehow even then they tend to be worse than you thought they would be.

5/5 stars. I need to see a therapist about this.