Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Reality can be disturbing. Heavy. Traumatic. But one of the purposes of art is to show us reality - the beautiful and the ugly. The best art brings together our intellect and our feelings, so that we don’t just view reality dispassionately, we feel it. Powerful fiction gives us the opportunity to not just learn about experiences not our own, but in some way, to feel we are experiencing them, too. Out of Darkness gives us that, which is perhaps why it upsets some people. We don’t want to know harsh truths about the racism in our history, and we certainly don’t want to have to feel we are experiencing it! The author doesn’t just give us a window to peek into another world, she allows us to be inside different characters, feeling their joy, their hopes, their fears. I am all churned up. This is what good literature does to a person. I’ll be sharing this book with my young adult children. They are 8th generation white Texans, and their grandfather grew up in East Texas at the time of this story. It is good for them to be churned up, too, to imagine stories outside the ones they have grown up hearing. To understand that reality is not limited to their own experience.