Out of Darkness

A dangerous forbidden romance rocks a Texan oil town in 1937, when segregation was a matter of life and death.

This is East Texas, and there's lines. Lines you cross, lines you don't cross. That clear?" New London, TX. 1937. Naomi Vargas is Mexican American. Wash Fuller is Black. These teens know the town's divisive racism better than anyone. But sometimes the attraction between two people is so powerful it breaks through even the most entrenched color lines. And the consequences can be explosive.

Naomi and Wash dare to defy the rules, and the New London school explosion serves as a ticking time bomb in the background. Can their love survive both prejudice and tragedy?

Race, romance, and family converge in this riveting novel that transplants Romeo and Juliet to a bitterly segregated Texas town. Includes a fascinating author's note detailing the process of research and writing about voices that have largely been excluded from historical accounts.

Out of Darkness calls for us to confront the inequalities that form the basis of our political system; the subsequent removal of the book from school libraries calls for us to confront the fact that these controversies, legitimized in almost all occasions by otherwise ineffectual school boards, mask the continued gutting of public education.