Review: 13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson

Would you follow the directions?

Would you travel around the world?

Would you open the envelopes one by one?

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.

Everything about Ginny will change this summer, and it's all because of the 13 little blue envelopes.

Review:  

I'd heard a lot of good things about this book and hadn't actually read anything by this author so i thought that this would be a good place to start. I though the story was nice and quick to get going and felt drawn into what was going on straight away. I thought the concept of a set of envelopes and instructions coming from a deceased relative was a really good idea and found myself wanting to read on to find out more. I really liked the travel aspect of this novel although the transitions between the various places could have been a little smoother, i switched of for a few seconds and suddenly our main character was in Rome, a little more preparation would have been nice!

I really liked the main character, Ginny, even though she did display a lot of the teenage character traits that i find myself usually disliking in a novel. She was a little hesitant to begin with, but overall, she was a pretty strong lead and i thought it took a lot of confidence to travel across the country like she did. The other characters in the book are a lot of fun too and she meets the kind of people you would expect as she is travelling across the world. Unfortunately i had downloaded this book on audio book rather than reading a physical copy and the narrator wasn't the best at accents. All the British accents she attempted to do sounded rather like comedy British accents we would put on, and as for attempting a German or Sottish accent, both sounded Asian unfortunately! I wouldn't recommend listening to this one on audio book!

The only other thing that concerned me slightly about the storyline of this book was the fact that Ginny was so accepting of the adults that she met along the way, she had no qualms with staying with men she had never met before, or getting into cars with strangers she had just seen at the theatre. I thought this was very unrealistic and whilst i knew it was a generally positive novel, and something fairly light-hearted, i was just waiting for her to be abducted or stabbed at any second. Overall though this was definitely a fun, light read that i got through pretty quickly whilst reading other things and if you're looking for something light-hearted to see you through Christmas. I would definitely recommend this one. If you're looking for something a little more realistic with a denser plot line, give this one a miss!