Before We Were Blue

Overview

"Before We Were Blue" follows Shoshana and Rowan, two teenagers who meet inside a residential treatment center for eating disorders. What begins as an alliance against the rigid structure of the program deepens quickly into something more consuming, a closeness that offers each girl comfort even as it threatens to undercut the very recovery they're supposed to be working toward.

E. J. Schwartz builds the novel around a tension that doesn't resolve easily: the pull between wanting to be known by another person and the risk of mistaking that connection for healing itself. As Shoshana and Rowan grow closer, their bond starts to blur the line between support and enabling, forcing each of them toward a reckoning neither can avoid.

The story narrows, finally, to a single choice facing both girls: whether to pursue health as individuals, even if it means loosening their grip on each other, or to stay bound together in a relationship that keeps them tethered to illness. The novel treats that decision with weight rather than resolution, resisting a simple answer about which path is right.

A Story of Intimacy and Illness

Novels set inside treatment facilities occupy a particular space in young adult literature, one that asks readers to sit with illness rather than watch it resolve neatly by the final chapter. Schwartz's book belongs to a lineage of YA fiction that treats eating disorders not as a plot device to be overcome but as a lived condition shaping how characters relate to themselves and to each other.

What distinguishes "Before We Were Blue" within that tradition is its focus on relationship rather than symptom. The novel is less interested in cataloguing disordered behavior than in examining how two people in crisis can become each other's lifeline and liability at once. That ambiguity, an intimacy that is both genuinely sustaining and quietly corrosive, is the book's central preoccupation, and it resists offering readers a tidy moral about which feelings to trust.

Why Before We Were Blue Has Been Challenged

A parent raising concerns about this title has argued that a novel set inside an eating disorder treatment center risks giving young readers a vivid, almost instructional window into disordered thinking and behavior, rather than simply portraying illness from the outside. The worry centers on exposure: that depicting the interior logic of restriction and compulsion in close, sympathetic detail could resonate with vulnerable teens in ways that go beyond empathy into imitation.

A second strand of objection concerns the romantic and emotional intensity between the two central characters, which some reviewers have found difficult to separate from the broader unease some challengers express about queer relationships appearing in books aimed at teenagers. Combined, these concerns, over mental illness content and over relationship content, have led to the book being challenged in 1 state and 1 district tracked in this catalog. Defenders of the novel counter that its unresolved ending and refusal to romanticize illness work against the very normalization that challengers fear, and that stories depicting the texture of recovery, including its setbacks, serve readers who recognize themselves in it.