A Girl Called Blue

‘She had wanted the truth and now here it was, the truth of who she really was.’ For Blue O’Malley, a resident for all her 12 years in an Irish orphanage known as Larch Hill, the discovery of the ‘truth’ of her identity comes as a cruel disappointment. So much of her time has been given up to dreaming of the family and home to which she might once have belonged but these aspirations have now to be abandoned and it is back to the everyday routine of orphanage life. There may be occasional breaks in the monotony and harshness (this is the Ireland of the early 1960s) but, in the main, the day-to-day life of Blue and her fellow inmates is one of unremitting suffering and misery. It may seem unpromising material for a children’s novel and, certainly, it is not a book to be recommended for its cheerfulness. What it does offer, however, is an unforgiving portrait of a society largely indifferent to the most basic human rights for its children.