Book Review: Is That You Miss Blue

Title: Is That You Miss Blue

Author: M.E. Kerr

Date: 1975

Publisher: Harper & Row

ISBN: none

Length: 170 pages

Quote: "Some of the faculty wear them, a few students wear them, and Miss Blue is worn by one.”

Trigger warning: This is not your typical Christian novel. Its major characters are students at a Christian school but have no spiritual lives. It's a novel about the slow insidious progress of major mental illness, and how people, including Christians, react when they realize that someone among them is not devout but schizophrenic. It's not meant to strengthen your faith; the author, who was not religious, didn't know or care whether you have any faith. It's meant to raise more questions and answers, to leave readers asking themselves "What would I do?"

Miss Blue isn't old enough to be senile, isn't young enough to be foolish, and she was brought up Episcopalian; she always knows which fork to use. If she's getting her religion all wrong, the only explanation is religious mania. And she's an excellent science teacher, rave her students. So is she just a little more religious than the rest of the Episcopalians at Charles School, or could she be descending, slowly but inexorably, into incurable schizophrenia? Schizophrenics are nearly always certifiable before age thirty. Miss Blue is a little past forty. As a teenager she was perky and popular. How long has she been a good teacher, a sincere Christian, and just a little bit strange? When did she change? Even her self-obsessed teenaged students want to know.

Later, in Me Me Me Me Me, Kerr mentioned the true story that fed into this book. All her early novels were based on true stories, she said. That was why they rang so true, although of course she'd changed the names and brought the details up to the latest fashion. This one is, like many true stories, inconclusive and haunting.

Because Kerr was known for contemporary novels with a lot of rough language, some hints of sex and violence, awareness of homosexuality (a lesbian couple are minor characters in Is That You Miss Blue) and interracial sex and other then-despised “deviations,” her books were never admitted to any denominational publishing ghetto. Episcopalians are better known for being upscale Anglo-Americans, the U.S. branch of the Church of England, which, as an “established church,” has had to soften its version of the Gospel considerably to be “inclusive,” than for evangelism or devoutness—though Episcopalians can be devout, if they choose, and some of them know their Bibles as well as anyone else does...Nevertheless, this novel, in which secular, lapsed, and actively rebellious Episcopalians are forced to think about their religion (if any), qualifies as a Christian novel; a main character who's “not very religious” will lead a main character who's been preaching atheism back to church toward the end.

I remember liking this book as a teenager simply because it's not a romance. The teenaged characters think about sex, a good bit, as sex. When they're not venting their own personal lust, what they see is that sex gets people into trouble; they're consistently reminded that they're better off waiting, whether it feels that way to them, on any given day, or not. The narrator is a normal girl who likes boys, but all she's finding to like about them, at fifteen, is their faces...maybe. A boy likes her, and she's bemused by his antics, which she diagnoses as projections of frustrated mother-love onto her; about The First Kiss she says, twice, “I wanted to boil my mouth” to get rid of his germs. (And does she connect that reaction, mentally, with the way Miss Blue wipes her hands? Probably, although she doesn't say it in so many words, and although Miss Blue seems to have unusually sweaty hands anyway.)

Some of Kerr's other early novels put fashion and contemporary news up front consistently enough that rereading them now feels like a nostalgia trip. If teenagers can imagine a school where they're not allowed to communicate electronically, at all, ever, I think the rest of this one has worn well. The real story took place in the 1940s; Kerr transplanted it into the 1960s; it was published in the 1970s and, although I can't picture a prep school where the deaf character would still be writing on stationery rather than texting, or at least typing her notes onto her own personal “tablet” computer, I can picture a story like this one unfolding at a prep school today. There could still be someone like Miss Blue and the mystery of whether, when, or how she slips over the line could still be compelling enough to take kids' minds off their romances, popularity contests, and family problems.

As an adult I'll even add that, while Miss Blue can still intrigue adult readers, Kerr had other things to say to other adults. Note how much more even than the romances and popularity contests the teenaged characters are attuned to, hurt by, the adults' problems.