Last year, Ashley Hope Perez's
Out of Darkness got a lot of buzz in my networks. Here's the synopsis:
"This is East Texas, and there's lines. Lines you cross, lines you don't cross. That clear?"
New London, Texas. 1937. Naomi Vargas and Wash Fuller know about the lines in East Texas as well as anyone. They know the signs that mark them. They know the people who enforce them. 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.
Ashley 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.
I got a copy and started reading. Then, I got to page 98 and paused at "I'm a low man on the totem pole." Prior to that reading, I'd had very limited--but positive--interactions with Ashley. So, I wrote to her about that line. Was it possible, I wondered, to take out or revise that one line in the next printing? Ashley wrote back, saying that she'd try.
Well... Ashley talked with her editor, and when the next printing was done, the line was changed. Ashley created a photo showing the change and shared it on social media, and she referenced our conversation. With her permission, I'm sharing her photo here:
I was--and am--gripped by, and deeply moved by the story she tells in
Out of Darkness. It got starred reviews and went on to win awards. With that change ("Nah, I'm a low man on the totem pole" was replaced with "Nah, no suck luck.", I can enthusiastically and wholeheartedly recommend it.
Here's my heartfelt thank you to Ashley for hearing my concern. For not being defensive. For not saying "but..." or any of the things people say instead of "ok." And of course, a shout out to her editor, Andrew Karre, and her publisher, Carolrhoda, for making the change.
Out of Darkness doesn't have any Native content. I'm recommending it because it is an excellent story, and because it is an example of what is possible when people speak up and others hear what they say.
Is
Out of Darkness in your library yet? If not, order it today.
Some places come into your life, others for a season. These places give us different lessons and memories that come often come back to haunt us in one way or another. Will the ghosts of Indiana end up in any of Ashley Hope 
Perez’s books? Who knows! Perhaps she was too busy during with school work during her time here that she didn’t get to experience Hoosier Hospitality to its fullest. Somehow, I doubt that. As you read through Ashley’s interview, you’ll realize that she engages with people, landscapes and histories. She wasn’t in Indiana very long, but long enough to claim her as an Indiana author. Her books bring the Latino experience to young adult literature. Her books include The Knife and the Butterfly (February 2012) and What Can’t Wait (2011), both from CarolRhoda Lab. Out of Darkess (CarolRhoda Lab) will be out in 2015.
Where did you grow up?
In Kilgore, Texas, which is about two hours east of Dallas and about an hour west of the Louisiana border. It’s an area known for friendly people, lots of churches, and miles and miles of pine trees. Also for its oil fields. My third novel, Out of Darkness, is the first I’ve ever set near where I grew up, and I suppose the seed for it came when I was a little kid. My dad would sometimes take my brother and me on veterinary calls, and I remember him pointing out the place in New London, Texas, where a school exploded killing almost two hundred children in 1937. That historical event is central to the story of Out of Darkness, although I made almost everything else up.
What were some of the first books you found as a child that turned you into a reader?
I was an early and eager reader, so I can’t really remember a time before I loved books. My older brother and I spent most of our summer mornings at the library near my dad’s clinic. Some of my childhood favorites include the original The Boxcar Children novel and Sydney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family stories, which are about a large Jewish family with many daughters. Even after I “graduated” to longer books, I still enjoyed lingering over the beautiful illustrations in Ezra Jack Keats books, and I remember being fascinated and a little scared by Chris Van Allsburg’s books, many of which didn’t have any words at all. One of my favorite things about being a mom is rediscovering the world of picture books. My son’s favorite lately is The Tooth Fairy Meets El Ratón Pérez by René Colato Laínez. El Ratón Pérez is the mouse that collects teeth (like the tooth fairy) in Mexico and many other Latin American countries. Besides the obvious appeal of seeing his own last name on the cover and sharing a middle name (Miguel) with the boy in the book, my son loved the beautiful illustrations and humor of the story.
Meat or vegetables?
Both! I was mostly vegetarian until I was pregnant with my son, but something changed then. Now I have come to enjoy pulled pork, bacon, and carne asada on occasion. I’m still perfectly happy to eat vegetarian most of the time, though, and roasted kale and sweet potatoes are ridiculously close to chocolate on my comfort food list.
Which famous person would you most like to have write a review for your book?
Hmmm… there are some famous people I’d love to have read my books (hi, Oprah!), but I’ve never thought about picking a reviewer.
What three things would you like to add to a list of national treasures?
I’d start with oral histories from “ordinary” black and Latino Texans prior to the Civil Rights Era. I’d also want to preserve gospel and folk music. I got a little silly in the post office recently when I discovered a new postage stamp featuring Lydia Mendoza, a San Antonio music legend who was gaining popularity around the time when my main character in Out of Darkness moves with her twin brother and sister from San Antonio to East Texas.
What book(s) are you currently in the middle of reading?
I am one of those people who always has a few books going at any given time. I just started re-reading The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy, which has long been a favorite of mine. I’m also reading Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin, Perfectly Good White Boy by Carrie Mesrobian, and a collection of stories by David James Poissant.
How did your writing career begin?
I was fortunate to have several professors encourage me during my college years, but I became a writer because I found my audience. This happened when I started teaching English and ESL at Chávez High School in Houston. Besides meeting all the standards and getting my students ready to have a serious chance at completing college, I wanted them to discover the pleasure of reading, a notion that was pretty foreign to most of my students. As my kids told me about what did or didn’t engage them, I learned that many of them felt “their story” was missing from the library shelves. My first novel, What Can’t Wait, incorporates many of the stories they shared with me, and I finished the first draft just in time to give it to my last group of students (all seniors) for graduation. My students were my first readers, and their excitement still tops every success I’ve had since.
How do you hope your writing engages young people?
I come at the idea of engagement from two main directions. First, I strive for authenticity, a goal that’s especially important when exploring experiences that have largely been relegated to the sidelines of 
literature. When describing immigrant family life or gang culture, for example, that means walking the none-too-clear line between realism and what might seem like stereotype. I want readers who recognize the world of one of my books to find that how I portray that world rings true. Second, I think about how I can invite all readers into the book, even (or especially) if their life is completely different. That’s been crucial to my efforts to write a novel set in the past. It matters to me that it be gripping to contemporary readers from all backgrounds.
Out of Darkness is due next year from Carolrhoda Lab. You wrote it while completing your PhD. Any tips on time management?
Be sure to sleep. It sounds obvious, but often when we’re overtaxed, we think that stealing hours from sleep will help us get more done. In the end, it only sabotages the next day’s productivity. Also, map out goals week by week and month by month. I also make a semester plan and a five-year plan. Although achieving a goal often takes longer than we expect, putting it down on paper brings us a smidge closer to making the daily choices that will turn the goal into a reality.
Why did you write Out of Darkness? What story did you want to tell?
I already mentioned the school explosion, which is central to the novel. But it’s about much more. At the heart of the novel are questions about who can love whom and how and where certain kinds of love are possible. Quite a bit has been written about interracial romances between white and black characters—Wench by Dolen Perkins-Valdez offers a fascinating and original take—but there is very little exploration of relationships between black and Latina/o characters during the Jim Crow era. That was one story I wanted to tell, and I also wanted to incorporate glimpses into the tripartite segregation system present in Texas, a system that separated children into white, “colored,” and “Mexican” schools. Hard things happened during these times, and some people would prefer for the sins of the past to remain hidden. It’s a protective impulse, but ultimately we have to face what our community has been if we are to have any hope of forging something better in the future. That said, I hope that my tenderness toward East Texas comes through in the novel.
There are a few weeks of summer left. I hope you’re able to relax and enjoy them! Thanks!
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Ashley Hope Perez,
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“An unflinching portrait with an ending that begs for another reading.” ~Kirkus
title: The knife and the butterfy
author: Ashley Hope Perez
date: 2012, Carolrhoda Lab Books
main character: Martin Azael Arevalo
The plot seems simple: where is Azael? He walks us through his own memories of how he got wherever he is, what his life has been like and some of his most recent memories with quite vivid descriptions of the places and people that surround him. As a tagger, Azeal is used to paying attention to visual details.
Azael spends his time observing Lexi, a girl he’s certain he doesn’t know. Yet, she holds the key to knowing where he is.
Azael and his brother raised themselves after their mother died and father was deported. They took to the streets and joined MS-13, a notorious gang. Alexi and her mother have lived in 19 homes in 10 years. She, like Azael turns to the streets for some stability. They both live lives that are easier to judge than to understand. Rather than describing the world to us, author Ashley Perez carries us into it. I know Perez doesn’t believe in glossaries but, non Spanish speakers would benefit from one with this book that doesn’t always provide context for clear meaning.
Perez recreates the past through Azael’s flashbacks and Lexi’s observation sessions. Azael uses his street smarts to provide an immediate evaluation of Lexi but he doesn’t totally discount her based upon his findings; he want’s, needs to know more. Perez manages to develop two very strong characters in this process even though she’s giving us Lexi through Azeael’s perceptions. She gives us a message there on judging people without really knowing them and this message in pronounced in what we find out about Theo.
Throughout the story there is a light-handed presence of faith. From the use of names to the religious imagery, Perez seems to say we’re more than our emotions and our humanity. In her Author’s Note, she states “…The Knife and the Butterfly is not a story of courtroom drama; the trials that interest me most take place in the human heart.”
I couldn’t help but wonder about the names in the story, and particularly what they mean. I think they mean Perez layers story and meaning quite well.
Azael: “whom God strengthens”
Lexi: “defender of men”
Gab, Gabriel: “God is my might”
Rebecca: “to tie”
Jason: “a healing”
Shauna: God is gracious
Theo: “gift of God”
Martin: from the God Mars (God of War)
As for the meaning of the knife and the butterfly, you’ll have to read the book.
Additional reviews
Bibliophilia
Stacked
Kirkus
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Educator and author Ashley Hope Perez put together this great guest post for Color Online earlier in the year. I decided to rerun for Caribbean Heritage Month.
Reading Women Writers of the Caribbean
There’s more to Caribbean literature than the (wonderful) well-known works like A Simple Habana Melody and In the Time of the Butterflies.
Come with me to discover the texts I teach as part of my college class on women writers of the Caribbean. These titles are not to be missed! I’ll discuss them, not in order of publication, but in the order in which I teach them.
“A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua). This piece is the first text I introduce students to. I start here because Kincaid issues a forceful critique against tourism, and I want to challenge my students to find ways of reading that go beyond literary tourism. This is our starting place for discussions of the connections between reading and ethics. The text often makes readers feel guilty, angry, and uncomfortable. We talk about why.
Prospero’s Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez (Trinidad). This is a fascinating adaptation and retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This is the first novel I teach in the course because Nunez’s critique of colonialism, valorization of the local and (re)appropriation of a master plot by a white writer are features that are pretty plain to students. This is what I call an “apprenticeship” novel that helps sensitize students to themes that they’ll encounter (more subtly) in subsequent novels.
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe). Here, Condé puts Tituba, a marginal historical figure from the Salem witch trials, on center stage, tracing her travels from the Caribbean to New England and back again. In addition to her reclamation of and play with the Salem history, Condé incorporates a cameo appearance by Hester Prynne of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, changing Hester’s fate in the retelling. Check out this blog for a subtle reading of I, Tituba
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Dominica). This classic of Caribbean literature offers yet another instance of rewriting canonical texts, for it imagines the pre-history of the Bertha character (the madwoman in the attic) fr
Educator and debut author Ashley Hope Perez was kind enough to agree to do a guest post on Women Writers of the Caribbean
Reading Women Writers of the Caribbean
There’s more to Caribbean literature than the (wonderful) well-known works like A Simple Habana Melody and In the Time of the Butterflies.
Come with me to discover the texts I teach as part of my college class on women writers of the Caribbean. These titles are not to be missed! I’ll discuss them, not in order of publication, but in the order in which I teach them.
“A Small Place” by Jamaica Kincaid (Antigua). This piece is the first text I introduce students to. I start here because Kincaid issues a forceful critique against tourism, and I want to challenge my students to find ways of reading that go beyond literary tourism. This is our st arting place for discussions of the connections between reading and ethics. The text often makes readers feel guilty, angry, and uncomfortable. We talk about why.
Prospero’s Daughter by Elizabeth Nunez (Trinidad). This is a fascinating adaptation and retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This is the first novel I teach in the course because Nunez’s critique of colonialism, valorization of the local and (re)appropriation of a master plot by a white writer are features that are pretty plain to students. This is what I call an “apprenticeship” novel that helps sensitize students to themes that they’ll encounter (more subtly) in subsequent novels.
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem by Maryse Condé (Guadeloupe). Here, Condé puts Tituba, a marginal historical figure from the Salem witch trials, on center stage, tracing her travels from the Caribbean to New England and back again. In addition to her reclamation of and play with the Salem history, Condé incorporates a cameo appearance by Hester Prynne of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, changing Hester’s fate in the retelling. Check out this blog for a subtle reading of I, Tituba
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (Dominica). This classic of Caribbean literature offers yet another instance of rewriting canonical texts, for it imagines the pre-history
Rgz SALON member Lyn Miller-Lachmann has been the Editor-in-Chief of MultiCultural Review; the author of the award-winning multicultural bibliography Our Family, Our Friends, Our World; the editor of Once Upon a Cuento, a collection of short stories by Latino authors; and most recently, the author of Gringolandia, a young adult novel about a refugee family living with the aftermath of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. The book is in its second print run and is available for order. (Don't forget to read the fascinating Cover Story for Gringolandia.)
We're honored to have Lyn here as part of the rgz SALON, a feature where four of the top kidlit experts clue us in to the best YA novels they've read recently. Today, she reviews What Can't Wait by Ashley Hope Perez (Lerner/Carolrohoda, 2011) and A Good Long Way by René Saldaña, Jr. (Pinñata Books, 2010).
"Talented young Latinas who struggle to reconcile their dreams with the demands of their families are featured in two new books by Latino authors. In both What Can’t Wait and A Good Long Way the girls’ families expect them to cook, clean, babysit, or contribute to the family income through part-time jobs that encroach on their time for schoolwork and rest. While responsibility to family is important, these strong girls find ways to overcome the restrictions and limitations and to build the foundation for a better life than that of their mothers and sisters.
"Although Jessy is only one of three point of view characters in
A Good Long Way, Saldaña weaves her story in with that of the two brothers, Roelito and Beto, Jr. After a fight with his father, Beto, Jr. runs away to Jessy’s house, hoping she’ll take him in. Jessy refuses, fearing the rage of her alcoholic father if her friend is discovered. The next day, Jessy, an honor student, breaks down in class, remembering her own attempts to run away, while Roelito looks for his older brother at school and Beto Jr. goes to work with his father in order to reconcile with him. Saldaña explores a man’s responsibility—a father for his family, and an older brother for his younger brother—and a girl who has
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Great interview and I hope to read her books. I’ve seen them around. I agree on not skipping out on sleep. We think we’re being productive, but it slows us down.
Great interview! I loved Ashley’s previous books and look forward to reading her newest one. I remember hearing about that school explosion at the time of the recent natural gas explosion near Waco, Texas a couple of years ago.
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