Banned Books Week: Ashley Hope Pérez’s “Out of Darkness”

October 1–7, 2023, is Banned Books Week, a week that “was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in libraries, bookstores, and schools.” Last year, Ashley Hope Pérez’s Out of Darkness was the 9th most challenged book. Out of Darkness debuted in 2015, and it went seven years without a ban or challenge. However, amidst the spate of book challenges that arose in 2021, Out of Darkness became a target, being banned, as Pérez herself notes, “in at least 29 school districts across the country” as of December 2022. This semester, I included Out of Darkness in my Banned Books syllabus for a few reasons. One of the main reasons, for me, was the proximity of the New London school explosion in 1937 to my hometown in Northeast Louisiana. As I read Pérez’s novel, I kept thinking about the region that raised me.

We know, as Pérez points out as well, that the argument that a book contains “sexually explicit content” sits on the surface of book bannings, yet “[w]hat distinguishes the targeted titles, though, is not their sexual content but that they overwhelmingly center the experiences of BIPOC, LGBTQ+ and other marginalized people.” This move excludes individuals not just from the school library but it sends “a powerful message of exclusion” not just saying that these books don’t belong in the library but that anyone…