As an adult when I pick up middle-grade and young adult books, I am thinking about what voids are being filled that weren’t around when I was growing up. While I am seeing more and more books with brown and black faces on them, good queer middle-grade books are still not as common as they should be. Still, we are getting better and when I see books that raise the bar in terms of what we expose to young kids, I love to find out more.
Enter P.S. I Miss You by Jen Petro-Roy. P.S. I Miss You gained attention when it was revealed that it was about an eleven-year-old girl named Evie writing letters to her sister who, after becoming pregnant, is sent away from their strict Catholic home. The letters are at first lovely lamentations and check-ins from Evie to Cilla, that eventually become Evie’s slow realization that she is a lesbian. Her romantic interest is a black girl named June who comes from a single parent family and unlike Evie’s Catholic upbringing, June is an atheist.
With a combination of religion, teen pregnancy, and a young lesbian protagonist, it was a recipe for controversy even though that is not what Petro-Roy intended.
Cover: Feiwel & Friends
“The middle-grade audience doesn’t have many books that deal with Catholicism or questioning of religion,” Petro-Roy told me when we sat down to discuss her book.
That issue of the crisis of faith was important to Petro-Roy because she went through her own around five years ago after she had children, consider what wanted to pass on to them in terms of who they should be.
One of her best friends was a queer woman who came out in college said that for her because she grew up in a very Catholic town she grew up with a “sense of shame” that lingered until she found her own sense of personal clarity that wasn’t defined by religious expectations.
In addition to her friend’s sexuality, part of what started Petro-Roy on this questioning path was going through recovery for an eating disorder.
“For me, having an eating disorder was wrapped up in this image and maintaining a perfect image. After I recovered I remember one of my family members saying ‘you should really thank God for helping you recover.’ That really made me pause, because I’m the one who did all the work. I’m the one who recovered so why am I giving so much credit to this figure? […] I don’t know whether I believe in God right now. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t […] but I knew I needed autonomy.”
When I was around eleven years old I was convinced I was going to Hell. This was before I knew I was queer, but I was convinced I was going to Hell because I was a fan of the supernatural and was convinced that one day I was gonna be a true blue witch. My teachers told me that was breaking the first commandment and that would be leading to fiery pits of damnation. For a while, I lived in this tepid fear of my afterlife being wrecked until I sat down and started asking myself: why?
Why was this important? Why did God care who I slept with or if I liked magic if in my heart I knew I wasn’t doing anything to dishonor him? I remember asking questions about faith, getting few answers back except for the ones I created for myself. If all these myths have stories about flood, how is our flood story the only real one?
I was eleven, still too young to understand the larger context of what religion meant, but only enough to know that I didn’t think good and bad were that simple or easy. While parents try to keep issues like religious doubt away from children, the reality is that kids think about these things. By the time I was 12-years-old, I had enough access to the internet to have an understanding of what sex and sexuality were, even I didn’t understand it fully, I knew it was something relatively important. As a child, you quickly learn that if your parents don’t want you to know about it, it’s something you should know.
Reading P.S. I Miss You was like having a conversation with my younger self. Evie’s voice in the epistolary framing, inspired by Dear Mr. Henshaw, is strong and you really see her as the young girl she is, missing her sister, and trying to figure out what these new feelings are.
There is nothing explicit in the book, it is for middle-grade, but it does capture the joy of that first real crush and the palpable fear of coming face to face with your otherness in an unkind world. Slowly reading Evie’s excitement about June liking her to the anxious dread that she might lose the love of her parents is relatable at any age.
Petro-Roy also manages to not make Evie’s parents come off as stereotypes. “I didn’t want to make them bad people […] just because Evie questions her religion doesn’t make Catholicism bad. Catholicism helps her parents, but it may not be for her. “There are a lot of other ways to grow up. It’s okay to question what you believe and that’s okay.”
They are not monsters who send their daughter to a Magdalene asylum, but they are disappointed and ashamed by their daughter’s choice and because of their faith, their daughter questions her place in the world and their life.
Yet, those moments of sadness are coupled with moments of youthful optimism and pen of an author who realizes it is just as important to uplift as it is to teach. And the teaching moments of P.S. I Miss You are just as good as the rest of it. Which makes it doubly unfortunate that schools in both liberal and conservative areas, across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, “have declined visits from Petro-Roy, citing the book’s ‘too heavy and mature’ content to explain why.”
In a world where children are being taught to have drills for a school shooting, I think the idea that two girls holding hands being “too mature” or teen pregnancy being “too heavy” when in 2015 “a total of 229,715 babies were born to women aged 15–19 years, for a birth rate of 22.3 per 1,000 women in this age group.”
What is important about this book is that it tells queer young people, “I see you and here’s a book that sees you too […] You are enough.” as Petro-Roy put it. Eleven and tweleve is hard enough, it’s easier when you know you aren’t alone.
P.S. I Miss You it out now from Feiwel & Friends and Petro-Roy’s upcoming middle-grade novel Good Enough dealing with eating disorders and recovery will be coming out in early 2019 and we look forwarding to picking it up then.
(image:Feiwel & Friends)
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