13 Little Blue Envelopes - Maureen Johnson

Anyone that knows me will tell you that I am not a picture of heroic masculinity.  Put me in any situation that involves typically manly pursuits (jar opening, Nazi fighting, press-upping, not crying at musicals) and I will fail faster than Starbuck in a sanity contest (kudos to all that get the reference).  My taste in literature has often been criticised for its girliness not to mention my taste in music, interior decoration and alcoholic beverages, yet even with this propensity, I found my latest book a little challenging.

13 Little Blue Envelopes is a book written by Maureen Johnson and actually by now it is pretty old.  Well actually that isn’t really fair but it was published in 2005 which is, for me, a long time ago – especially given the fact that I usually review books written within the last few years.  Maureen Johnson is famous(ish) to those of you of an American persuasion but I had not heard of her at all until very recently.  My introduction into the world of American Young Adult fiction (largely avoiding stories involving teen vampires) first took me to the world of John Green and through his books I discovered his amazing Youtube channel that he runs with his brother Hank called the ‘Vlogbrothers’.  Now many of you will be intimately familiar with it and will be screaming at me HOW DID IT TAKE YOU THIS LONG TO FIND OUT ABOUT IT??? Well to those people I can only say, I was probably busy playing Football Manager, because that is probably an accurate summary of most of my free time as a teenager.  Anyway (this post is taking even longer than usual to get to the point), through them I was introduced to Maureen Johnson’s books and after some brief Amazoning (surprised that isn’t a verb yet) I decided to start with 13 Little Blue Envelopes.

This is a story about an American girl called Ginny who receives in the mail 13 envelopes, from her recently deceased aunt.  Her aunt is a classic bohemian arty type who has eschewed the rather conservative nature of her family to go gallivanting around Europe.  The first of these letters gives Ginny a credit card with some money and tells her to book a flight to London, leaving all electronic devices behind.  She can only bring one rucksack and can’t bring any maps/guidebooks etc with her and has to open each envelope only after accomplishing each task contained in the previous one.  This leads her on a crazy trip around Europe, seeing her visit, amongst other places: London, Edinburgh and Paris.  The trip itself is a journey of discovery for Ginny in two ways: learning about the life of her aunt and also finding out more of who she is and what she can do whatever misgivings that she may have.

Now, this book is very clearly not marketed at me – I mean it is more closely marketed to me than say a 70 year old ex-navy veteran with a penchant only for whisky and stories involving hard-core nudity – but even so I am clearly not the intended audience here.  My first clue really should have come from the cover.  Generally books aimed at boys are a little less pink (though to be fair she is grasping her thighs in a rather suggestive manner...) The point is that this book is meant to be read by girls like Ginny Blackstone: nervous, timid 14 year old American girls who are trying to find out who they are and want nice boys to like them.  I can’t blame Maureen Johnson for this, those people make up about 80% of the standard readership of YA books.  Normally this is not much of a problem.   I mean I was never an American girl but I can at least identify with the nervous timid bits and even if I could not, the human imagination is a wonderful thing.  Good books manage to appeal to a wide readership, giving everyone no matter who they are a little thing to grab hold of and identify with and the problem with this book is that it doesn’t quite manage that.  The major problem is found in the middle of this book where Ginny falls rather hopelessly for a university drama boy called Keith.  She falls in love in much the same way that Juliet falls for Romeo – hopelessly without much regard for finding out anything about him – and it is at this point the book starts to develop some severe angst, which, in my view, came dangerously close to ruining it.  A little romantic tension is fine, but this was very stereotypical girl-angst, familiar to anyone who has ever been on Myspace (a reference that anyone who wasn’t born between about 1987-1993 is unlikely to get).  This got in the way of what was a rather interesting story and threatened to turn it into something that more closely resembled Twilight fan fiction.

Luckily, this was only a part of this story and it did have many other excellent features.  My personal favourite was the description of Ginny’s time in London – and this is where this book not being aimed at me actually comes full circle and becomes an advantage.  Any Londoner will be familiar with the hilarity that is American tourists.  You can spot them a mile off normally as they are invariably 1) Lost, 2) Wearing shorts in inappropriate weather, 3) Wearing walking-trainers, 4) Loud.  Now Ginny is not all of these things but she rather superbly acts the part of tourist in my city.  She gets baffled by Tube ticket machines (seriously I see this all the time and I have no idea why it is so hard to understand), confused by Harrods (I’m actually with her on this one) and confused by how Ribena works (I had no idea that squash could confused people but apparently this is a real confusion for some non-Brits).  Her experience as a tourist in all these cities, not just mine, made me laugh a lot and in general this was a very funny book, mostly intentionally.

I find that Young Adult books normally – more than other genres – tend to contain significant life lessons; something edifying for its predominantly teenage audience to ponder over after finishing.  This story is mostly about self-belief and finding that there is much more to yourself than you may give credit for.  Ginny spends most of the book saying how she wishes how she was ‘more interesting’, that she had more ‘stories’.  Now this is despite the fact that she followed her aunt’s instructions throughout the book without question, some of which were really quite dangerous in retrospect.  While the teen girl-angst was present, that was not the dominant force of the narrative (thankfully) and it is this part of the story that I most enjoyed.  This was not a moral that was stuffed down your throat.

6.5/10

Favourite Quotes

“She was standing in the airport of Copenhagen, staring at a doorway, trying to figure out if it was (a) a bathroom and (b) what kind of bathroom it was. The door merely said H.
Was she an H? Was H "hers"? It could just as easily be "his". Or "Helicopter Room: Not a Bathroom at All”

“I like you because you were mad. And you're pretty. And pretty sane for a mad person.”

"No shoe should be judged by its footprint, for the foot has a print of its own."