“A Cloud of Outrageous Blue” by Vesper Stamper – Book Impressions

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases through affiliate links to Amazon.com.

I bought “A Cloud of Outrageous Blue” last year at the Touchstone Conference after meeting Vesper Stamper, its author and one of last year’s speakers. I had been impressed listening to Vesper talk about her life in a couple of podcasts I listened to before the event and it was wonderful to actually get to speak with her in person. We certainly do have a couple of common interests, and I hope that we’ll get to meet again.

In any case, I finally got around to reading the book a couple of weeks ago. I flew through it. Mind you, it’s written as a young adult book, which does tend to make it easier to go through a work quickly, but more than that, it was the type of good that made me not want to put it down. With all the distractions in my life these days, getting through it in such a fashion is high praise in itself.

The book centers around a young woman named Edyth whose family is ripped apart towards the end of 1348. Having few other prospects after her father falls into disgrace, her older brother arranges for her to live at a convent. She’s not being forced to take vows to become a nun, but because she’s living at the convent, she’s subject to their rules and their way of life. As a teenager who had her own picture of how her life was going to play out, she’s far from happy about this turn of events. On the other hand, life at the convent is not easy, but apart from her growing conflict with the second-in-charge, it isn’t terrible either.

However, as the story wends its way into 1349, there is a creeping danger to the tranquility of the convent. Plague. For a good long while, it’s the boogeyman creeping around the edges of their consciousness, but nothing that has touched the daily routines of the ancient church. Soon enough, though, there’s nowhere to run from it…

As I mentioned before, I liked this book a lot. The writing is really good, and the setting is fairly unusual as well. Furthermore, while it isn’t a “Christian” book, per se, the fact that the majority of the story takes place in the convent and is not hostile to Christianity is refreshing. Sure, Edyth sometimes finds herself running afoul of the convent’s rules. On the other hand, even within the book, one can pick up on the place kind of running on its own separate time – seasons, feast days, daily offices, work and prayer that become as routine as breathing.

In the end, there are choices and consequences, death and miracles, and the things that legends are made of. As dark as some of this book can get – and I definitely wouldn’t recommend anyone under ten read it without someone with whom they can talk to about some of these themes – in the end, there is great light, and a path for Edyth that is totally unexpected. In this way, the book stands in sharp contrast to a lot of what passes for “young adult” literature these days, particularly with their themes of magick and eternal death.

I liked this book so much that I got myself a copy of another one of Vesper’s books, “Berliners“. I hope to get to it soon! Also, there’s another book that’s coming out this year that Vesper was part of creating, “A Knot is Not A Tangle“, where she served as illustrator… Yes, that’s one thing that I forgot to mention above – besides writing the book, Vesper also illustrated it, so the entire book has her illustrations interspersed throughout. Usually, I don’t pay very much attention to illustrations, but they certainly do augment the book beautifully.

Anyway, if any of you have read this or any other of Vesper Stamper’s books, I’d love to hear from you! 🙂

---