Review: 13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson

Book: 13 Little Blue Envelopes

Author: Maureen Johnson

Publisher: HarperCollins

Release date: August 23, 2005

Source: Free ebook purchased from Amazon

Summary: (from Goodreads) When Ginny receives thirteen little blue envelopes and instructions to buy a plane ticket to London, she knows something exciting is going to happen. What Ginny doesn't know is that she will have the adventure of her life and it will change her in more ways than one. Life and love are waiting for her across the Atlantic, and the thirteen little blue envelopes are the key to finding them in this funny, romantic, heartbreaking novel.

First impressions: I love a book that wastes no time jumping into the action, and this one definitely falls into that category. It opens with the first letter to Ginny from her Aunt Peg, explaining the journey that's going to take up the bulk of the rest of the book.

Lasting impressions: The travel aspects were a lot of fun to read, but I found it kind of unbelievable at times.

Conflicting impressions: For a high school student practically alone on her trek across Europe, Ginny seemed remarkably at ease. I kept waiting for her to experience some crippling self-doubt or break down and rip open the rest of the envelopes like any normal person would do, but instead she kind of wandered aimlessly at times and never seemed to get overwhelmed by this immense task.

Overall impressions: Every book requires some suspension of disbelief, but this one seemed to require it in massive doses. First, as other reviewers have mentioned before me, I find it hard to believe that Ginny is allowed to up and go to Europe. She has very few resources and is instructed (through her dead aunt's letters) to bring no helpful guidebooks or other sources of money.

Now I get that her kooky, free-spirited aunt wanted her to go on a journey of self-discovery, and that her parents probably felt she'd be fine because said kooky aunt probably wouldn't do anything to get her injured/maimed/killed, but...REALLY? There is no way my parents would have allowed that.

Maybe because I am an awful person, or maybe because I am sane, I also find it hard to believe that Ginny wouldn't have opened all the letters, or even just the first few. The temptation would be so hard to resist! Sure, she wants to experience this journey of Aunt Peg's but I certainly would not have had that kind of trust in my aunt.

But this is Ginny's story, not mine. It doesn't matter what I would do, because it's about what Ginny would do, and Ginny chose to follow her aunt's instructions on a wild goose chase around Europe. As she accomplishes tasks similar to those her aunt completed while spending her last few months alive, Ginny meets some interesting new friends and relatives, gets herself into some pretty ridiculous scenarios, and learns quite a bit about her aunt and herself along the way.

It's a charming idea that Johnson developed well, and it was fun to get little glimpses of various European towns as Ginny makes her way to and from them. Still, some of the action dragged a bit at times, and the breakneck pace meant we were often flying off to someplace new before we'd had much of a chance to breathe and get to know where we had just been. I think 13 was a lot of envelopes to try and get through, and perhaps focusing on a smaller number would have allowed us to get to know Ginny a bit more and have her accomplish some tasks more in-depth.

This is a fun travel tale that I think younger teens would gobble up, but for the rest of us world-weary and cynical types it was sometimes too much to swallow.

Rating: 3/5 stars

Click the stars for a description of my rating system

Writing Wednesday - The Struggle to Revise

 
As mid-October rapidly approaches, I am starting to get inundated with reminders about the upcoming National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Message boards are lighting up with new posts, my writing studio is advertising prep classes to generate ideas, and Twitter is full of folks practicing their daily word counts.

I participated in NaNoWriMo for the first time last year and made it - barely. I finished with a pitiful draft of a half-cocked idea and perhaps only a handful of scenes that would actually work. When I faced the prospect of trying to revise this messy, disorganized pile of words, I got so overwhelmed that I simply turned my back on it and started to write something else.

Once again, I got stuck with nowhere to take my plot and only a vague concept of where I wanted this story to go. But never fear! To the rescue is the month of November, swooping in to occupy my mind on a new story, new characters, and no fear of revisions!

It's an escape tactic, you see. I always struggle with revisions. Despite an entire shelf of helpful writing books and tools, many pages of helpful critique notes, and a laptop loaded with the handy Scrivener program to help me sift through the story without getting lost, I can't ever manage to get over my fear of revising.

What if I start making changes and the entire thing shifts into something new? What if I start making changes and I hate the whole project? What if I lose the essence of the characters?

The issue is staring me directly in the face. I need to focus on the heart of my story and not drown myself in self-doubt. I often think of the arts as an exercise in false confidence. When I was a theater student, sometimes to get over your fears you had to "fake it 'til you make it" so to speak. If I allowed my doubts to get the best of me, I'd never succeed, and sometimes I just had to take a leap of faith and trust that I had the goods to get it done.

In the fall of my senior year in college, I took on the role of Puck in our production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. As most people know, Puck closes the show with a monologue delivered to the audience. It's a beautiful speech, and an endearing moment between the audience and the character. It's also a very important and powerful moment, which was not lost on me.

Despite months of rehearsals, weeks of performances, and thousands of recitations, every night I turned to my castmate, Zack, and asked him how the speech started. It didn't matter how many times I'd done the speech myself. I knew Zack knew the speech, and as we huddled in the dark backstage, waiting to go out for the final scene, I could never think of the first few words. "If we shadows have offended," he'd whisper, and I'd nod and start mumbling under my breath, "if we shadows have offended if we shadows have offended," right up to the moment I took a step onstage.

It wasn't that I didn't know the speech. I did. Backwards and forwards. But as the exhaustion of the production started to set in, and I waited in the wings for my entrance, the weight of the delivery of that speech started to bear down on me. I would get so worked up about the magnitude of the task that I forgot that I actually had the skills to bring it home. Until the moment I stepped on stage and had no choice but to get through it, the speech became greater than me and not the other way around.

This is how I feel when I write. As I'm entrenched in the task of getting the story down on the page, I'm ecstatic. It's when I have to step back and examine what I'm doing that I go from "let me get this cool idea down on paper" to "OHMIGOD I'm writing A WHOLE BOOK!" In order to try and combat this, I've tried just focusing on scenes, but that also doesn't seem to help. My next step is to try putting together an outline to keep me aware that this is just many small parts that add up to one greater idea, and that it doesn't all have to be tackled at once.

Anyone else have this kind of revisers' block? How do you prevent yourself from getting overwhelmed?

Trailer Tuesday

There are very few things I geek out over more than Shakespeare, so imagine my barely containable glee when I saw this trailer for the first time this week:



I am rabidly chomping at my metaphorical bit to see this movie. Historical intrigue! Political bribery! And thousands of moments that are just begging for a good "You can't handle the truth!" to be blurted out. As if Elizabethan England and a plot revolving around Shakespeare weren't enough, I love that they're playing the plagiarism/ghost writer angle.

Did Shakespeare actually write his entire canon? I'm certain that a Hollywood production will not provide definitive answers, but it looks to be darn good entertainment at the very least.

Had you seen this trailer yet? What are your thoughts on the movie?