Rowena’s review of 13 Little Blue Envelopes
Inside little blue envelope 1 are $1,000 and instructions to buy a plane ticket.
In envelope 2 are directions to a specific London flat.The note in envelope 3 tells Ginny: Find a starving artist.Because of envelope 4, Ginny and a playwright/thief/ bloke–about–town called Keith go to Scotland together, with somewhat disastrous–though utterly romantic–results. But will she ever see him again?
Everything about Ginny will change this summer, and it’s all because of the 13 little blue envelopes.
This was a really quick read for me. It was one of those books that you picked up, got sucked in and then put down because you were done with it. The fantasy of going on a trip like Ginny did in this book had me excited and ready to live vicariously through Ginny. I mean, it’s the summer and you find out that the crazy Aunt you’ve always loved is dead and left behind 13 little blue envelopes with instructions on what she wants you to do in each of those envelopes. Everything that she has to do for her Aunt is in Europe. Can you imagine going to England all by yourself when you’re not even 18 yet? I can’t. It would have never happened…and let’s forget about the simple fact that when I was 17, I was pregnant with Brenna.
Still, my aunt (any of them for that matter) would never have sent me on a trip to Europe all by myself but that’s okay because this book was still cool because of it. So we have Ginny on an adventurous journey to England traveling all over Europe, following her Aunts instructions in the little blue envelopes. All of these things gave Ginny the kind of adventure she’d never in a million years have had if left to her own devices and while I did enjoy the book, it wasn’t exactly spectacular.
After putting the book down, I didn’t feel completely satisfied with the story as a whole. I mean, the story was fine but I didn’t feel as if I completely knew who Ginny was and as great as going on a trip to England and then traveling to all of those different European countries would have been, like Keith, I was pissed off at her Aunt. So her Aunt takes off and just disappears off the face of the earth. She doesn’t tell her family, the people who love, care and worry about her anything. She doesn’t tell them that she packed up her life and moved to Europe, she doesn’t tell them that while she was in Europe, she was homeless and then got sick and then died. I mean, she had to have known for a while that she was dying since she had time to write all of those letters and then prepare Ginny’s trip for her. So she’s been sick, she got married and then she dies, all without letting her family know.
I thought that was completely selfish of the Aunt because the family, Ginny especially thought that she was off somewhere, being the independent artist that she is, healthy and alive…only to find out that she’s dead. She finds out by reading these letters that she left behind. I mean, alls well that ends well but still, I thought that was a pretty shitty way to tell the niece that loved the hell out of you everything that you should have told her when she was alive.
Overall, the book had some good parts in it that had me cracking up, like when we first meet Keith and he’s acting in this total shit play and then when Ginny chases down Keith’s friend while he’s piping drunk and it was good to get to know Ginny while she ran around Europe but for me, it lacked the emotional attachment that I usually get with the main characters in any story that I read. So yeah, it was good but it’s not a book that I’d pick up to re-read again.
Grade: 3 out of 5
This book is available from Harper Teen. You can buy it here
I have wanted to read this book for the longest time. The cover caught my attention when I saw it ages ago because I remember my grandmother getting envelopes like this and it was so exotic to me.
I must confess that the idea of being so young and travelling by myself is very foreign for me too!