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Book Review: 13 Little Blue Envelopes
Jun. 4th, 2013 12:04 amJust finished Maureen Johnson's 13 Little Blue Envelopes, which follows the heroine, Ginny, as she wends her way through Europe, following the itinerary that her recently deceased aunt laid out in, you guessed it, notes enclosed in thirteen little blue envelopes.
Does this not sound like the kind of thing I would love? European travel! With an epistolary element! But it's just so...bland. The cities seem to blend together, not least because Ginny spends a lot of time in a sort of travel fugue of feeling lonely and out of place and not interested in anything. This is something that happens when one travels alone...but also a totally boring way to write a book about travel.
The other problem, which is exacerbated by the fact that Ginny does spend so much of the book traveling alone, is that Ginny is basically a pleasant non-entity and can't carry a book by herself. She seems to have been constructed on the theory that if you give a character very few traits beyond a vague and intermittent shyness, then readers will find it easy to identity with her.
Speaking for myself and perhaps myself alone, I never find these characters easy to identify with. They're so frictionless and flat that they don't seem quite real, and it's much easier to identify with someone who is in most ways unlike me, but feels real.
On the other hand, I don't know if saddling Ginny with a travelling companion would have made things better, because the secondary characters don't pop either. I was particularly disappointed by Ginny's best friend, who seems to exist solely so Ginny can write her letters gushing about this boy Keith that she met. Ginny never thinks of Miriam when she's not writing letters; when she wrote the first letter I was like "So who are you writing to, again?" Because the character had not been previously introduced.
And Ginny's crush Keith also is pretty disappointing. He's Ginny's main emotional connection in the book (other than her dead aunt, whose letters are charming because I am a sucker for quirky artists), but there's just...not a lot there. I simultaneously wanted there to be more (because grand romantic travel passion would have been fun, if ridiculous, and would have added purpose and direction to a shapeless book), and didn't buy what little there was.
So that was my excursion into Maureen Johnson's oeuvre. I guess it is good to have proven so thoroughly that I don't need to read any more of her work.
Does this not sound like the kind of thing I would love? European travel! With an epistolary element! But it's just so...bland. The cities seem to blend together, not least because Ginny spends a lot of time in a sort of travel fugue of feeling lonely and out of place and not interested in anything. This is something that happens when one travels alone...but also a totally boring way to write a book about travel.
The other problem, which is exacerbated by the fact that Ginny does spend so much of the book traveling alone, is that Ginny is basically a pleasant non-entity and can't carry a book by herself. She seems to have been constructed on the theory that if you give a character very few traits beyond a vague and intermittent shyness, then readers will find it easy to identity with her.
Speaking for myself and perhaps myself alone, I never find these characters easy to identify with. They're so frictionless and flat that they don't seem quite real, and it's much easier to identify with someone who is in most ways unlike me, but feels real.
On the other hand, I don't know if saddling Ginny with a travelling companion would have made things better, because the secondary characters don't pop either. I was particularly disappointed by Ginny's best friend, who seems to exist solely so Ginny can write her letters gushing about this boy Keith that she met. Ginny never thinks of Miriam when she's not writing letters; when she wrote the first letter I was like "So who are you writing to, again?" Because the character had not been previously introduced.
And Ginny's crush Keith also is pretty disappointing. He's Ginny's main emotional connection in the book (other than her dead aunt, whose letters are charming because I am a sucker for quirky artists), but there's just...not a lot there. I simultaneously wanted there to be more (because grand romantic travel passion would have been fun, if ridiculous, and would have added purpose and direction to a shapeless book), and didn't buy what little there was.
So that was my excursion into Maureen Johnson's oeuvre. I guess it is good to have proven so thoroughly that I don't need to read any more of her work.
