Saturday, July 09, 2005

13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson

Ginny receives 13 little blue envelopes from her recently dead Aunt. These envelopes soon direct her on a wild ride through Europe to not only have the experience of a life time, but to discover something about her self and to solve the mystery of what her Aunt really wants her to do. One problem: there are rules to this chase. 1) She can only bring what fits in her backpack. 2) No guide books, phrasebooks, or any kind of foreign language aid, and no journals. 3) No extra money that includes debit/credit cards traveler’s checks etc. 4) No electronic crutches (No laptop, no cell phone, no music, and no camera.) She also can't talk to people in the US by phone or Internet. Because she can only open one envelope at a time she has no idea where she'll be going next. On the way she finds love, adventure and learns a lot about life.

I enjoyed the variation of writing. There was some romance, humor, adventure, mystery and just plain good realistic fiction. There was something for everybody, but there was not any fantasy. Although, I must say that it was mostly chic literature. Every book has its ups and downs. In this book the unexciting parts were few and far between, but they immediately are followed an extremely exciting scene, which made them seem better than they really were. At those points you almost wanted to put the book down and get a snack, then come back in a few minutes to start the building up to excitement again. Good thing that there were only two or three of those parts.

Rating (0 - 10 scale): 8

Review by KA