YMMV / A Girl Called Blue

• Esoteric Happy Ending: While Blue does find a bright spot in her weekends with Jimmy and his mother, the book ends with the knowledge that she'll get to live with them when she turns sixteen and is old enough to leave Larch Hill. That's at least three years from now, and she's just been put in what's basically a cell for a room that she's going to be locked in when she's not at work or school, has lost every friend except Lil and Sister Monica, and is likely to endure more abuse before she can leave.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Not just the drowning off poor Jess, but the revelation shortly after that Eileen, who had been said to be her distant relative, turns out to be her biological mother who had been convinced to put her daughter into Larch Hill for a "better life".
  • Blue puts her heart and soul into making a costume for the fancy dress party. She ends up yelled at by Sister Regina, and given "The Reason You Suck" Speech to make her feel ashamed. It's one of the few times in the book that she cries.
  • She ends up in hospital after Sister Regina's attack in the office. The doctor and nurse can tell it wasn't just an accident and ask her to tell them who did it, but she's too afraid of Sister Regina's retribution if she confesses.
• Values Dissonance:
  • Blue's costume for the fancy dress party is based on an African tribal woman she saw a picture of in National Geographic. While the nuns are framed as being overly strict for disapproving of it, today it would be seen as culturally appropriative even if Blue didn't realise.
  • While Sister Monica speaks highly of her time in Africa, she refers to them as "a simple people".
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: While a children's book, it is especially for the older demographic, since it features realistic beatings at the hands of nuns, talk about alcoholism and parental abandonment, one of the protagonist's friends drowning, and a lot of existentialism.
• The Woobie:
  • Good lord, the universe seems to conspire to make Blue's life as miserable as possible. Not only is she an orphan with no living relatives, but she's introduced being told her potential foster family doesn't want to see her anymore. The nuns have it in for her, and Sister Regina seems to delight in punishing her. Not to mention how she loses her best friend to drowning, is separated from two more, and finds out she was abandoned as a baby.
  • Molly, whose mother died and she's placed into Larch Hill while her father looks for work in England. She also has problems with bed wetting, and is humiliated daily when the nuns make her take her sheets to the laundry room, meaning she doesn't have time to wash. The girls at school then refuse to sit next to her because of the smell.
  • Sarah Murphy, who has an alcoholic father and is in the home with her sister because he beat their mother so badly she ended up in hospital. It's said that she prays for her mother every night. Not to mention when headlice are discovered, she has to have her beautiful long hair cut off.