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Feb 13, 2017ryner rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
It is 1936, and high-schooler Naomi Vargas has just moved from San Antonio to east Texas to live with her step-father Henry, who works in the oil fields. While her two younger siblings can easily pass for white, Naomi takes considerably after her deceased mother -- clearly of Mexican heritage. This poses some difficulties in the community, where she mocked in school and advised to use the "back door" when purchasing groceries. Finding that her exhausting role in her new household is more or less that of a live-in maid, Naomi seeks solace in her newfound friendship with Wash Fuller, a boy from the nearby black community of Egypt Town. There was something about this book that irritated me throughout, though I was never quite able to put my finger on what it was. I did appreciate that Henry was reasonably fleshed out, though it would have been perhaps tempting to paint him into a more one-dimensional personality. Although briefly mentioned in the opening pages, it was easy to forget while absorbed in the book that the author's underlying spark for the story is an actual school explosion that occurred in New London, Texas, in 1937. Fair warning: the final scenes in this young adult novel are almost unbearably horrifying.