Friday, 8 June 2012

13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson

"If your free-spirited aunt left you 13 little blue envelopes: Would you follow the directions? Would you travel around the world? Would you open the envelopes one by one? Inside envelope 1 is money and instructions to buy a plane ticket. Inside envelope 2 are instructions to a specific London flat. Inside envelope 3 tells Ginny: Find a starving artist. Because of envelope 4, Ginny and a playwright/thief/man-abut-town called Keith go to Scotland together, with disastrous - though really romantic - results. But will she ever see him again? Everything about Ginny will change this summer, and it's all because of 13 little blue envelopes..."

I think it's fair to say by now that I am a huge fan of Maureen Johnson. She's almost completely mental, which really shows in her ability to create amazing characters who are both insane and easy to relate to. The plot of this story is fairly simple, but the way everything weaves together is utterly perfect. The character of Ginny is someone who we initially don't know that much about, other than her love for her runaway artist aunt. This enables us to make up our own mind about her, and find much more of ourselves in the character. Each letter brings a new task, and with every task we learn a little more about Ginny and her Aunt Peg. Each task is something that I think very few of us would be able to do with as much ease as Gnny seemed to do, which doesn't seem very out of place as we the readers know that Aunt Peg found it very easy to uproot herself and so it might be expected that Ginny would follow some similar traits.

This book made me want to travel to a rather desperate extent where I wanted to drive own to Cornwall in the ran because it seemed like the closest I might actually get to travelling the world right now. This inspired me so much, and I really can't explain how much I want to travel right now.

I give this book 9 out of 10, because I really can't fault it, but I'm still waiting to find the "best book I'll ever read".

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