Review: 13 Little Blue Envelopes

Every girl should have a quirky but loving aunt, a free spirit unencumbered by the responsibilities of motherhood who encourages her niece to think outside the box and embrace the unknown. I had one. So did seventeen year-old Ginny Blackstone, in Maureen Johnson’s 13 Little Blue Envelopes (HarperTeen, 2006).

This whirlwind of a book begins with a letter to Ginny from her Aunt Peg, an artist. Aunt Peg has enclosed $1,000 cash for a passport, a one-way ticket from New York to London, and a backpack, along with four rules and instructions to pick up a package at 4^th Noodle, the Chinese restaurant under her old apartment in New York City. The package turns out to be a packet of thirteen letters, the first of which is to be opened on the plane.

This kind of action was just something Ginny might have expected from Aunt Peg, who had mysteriously left New York City two years earlier for an open-ended trip to Europe.

But Aunt Peg had died of a fast-moving brain tumor three months earlier. 

Guided by the letters and Aunt Peg’s friends, Ginny visits London, Edinburgh, Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, the Greek island of Corfu, and finally, back to London. Along the way, Ginny collects pieces of information about her beloved and enigmatic aunt, finds romance, and learns something about herself.

At times, Johnson’s plot seems a little implausible. Would Ginny’s practical mother really allow her daughter to go to Europe solo on an adventure orchestrated by her unpredictable sister Peg? My advice is to suspend disbelief and just enjoy Ginny’s European adventure. Let go, as Aunt Peg might have said, and live a little. Harrod’s of London, Rome’s narrow and bustling streets, Parisian cafés, the canals of Amsterdam, a trip on a modern-day Danish Viking’s houseboat to see the windmills, the impossibly blue waters of Corfu—all come to life in Johnson’s vivid, lively descriptions.

Why am I recommending a book that came out in 2006? Because the sequel to “13 Little Blue Envelopes,” titled The Last Little Blue Envelope, was just released in April of this year (that one’s for another review!). If you want to join Ginny on her next European adventure, you really owe it to yourself to read the first one. Perfect summer reading for high school girls with a little wanderlust but no Aunt Peg to send them to Europe.

And now a note about what I think was brilliant marketing. Maureen Johnson offered a free download of 13 Little Blue Envelopes to coincide with the publication of the above-mentioned sequel, The Last Little Blue Envelope, betting (rightly, in my case), that reading the first book would motivate people to buy the second. This seems like a great strategy for authors of series books. I rarely (never?) pick up a book mid-series without having read the first one. What do you think? 

Based on my review originally published in The News-Gazette, June 26, 2011. 

Double rainbow

I just returned from a road trip to St. Peter, Minnesota to help a dear friend celebrate her 60th birthday. It's a  9 hour drive each way, although I would drive any distance for this woman. I generally like road trips, unless I happen to get caught in a raging, pull-over-to-the-side-of-the-road-because-I-can't-see thunderstorm  as I did--twice!--on the way back. But I was rewarded after the storm by the sight of this double rainbow, somewhere near LeRoy, Illinois.

"Revolver" Loaded With Suspense

"Even the dead tell stories."

So begins Marcus Sedgwick's terrific novel “Revolver” (Roaring Book Press, 2010), a Prinz Honor Book for 2011. Fourteen year-old Sig Andersson had heard his father say these words many times before. Now, with his father's frozen corpse lying on the table in his family's cabin somewhere north of the Arctic Circle, Sig waits for the dead man's story to unfold.

The main action of Revolver takes place in just three days in 1910 outside of Giron, a lonely outpost in northern Scandinavia. The Giron chapters are interspersed with passages set in Nome, Alaska in 1899-1900 that fill in the back-story. Sig has found his father, fallen halfway through the ice where he’d tried to cross the nearby lake on his dogsled. Sig realizes that his father must have been in a terrible rush to get home, violating his own advice, "Never cross the lake by the river mouth; the ice is always thinner there. Even in wintertime." But what—or who—could have caused his father to abandon all caution in his haste to get home?

After his sister and stepmother (their mother was murdered in Nome) leave to get help, Sig’s first clue to the mystery of his father’s death arrives in the form of a terrifying visitor, a giant of a man named Günter Wolff. Wolff claims that Sig’s father owes him a share of gold, stolen while both were working in Nome. Sig knows nothing of the gold; neither does his sister Anna, who returns alone. Now both Sig and Anna are Wolff’s captives. He makes it clear that he will kill one of them to get the other to reveal the location of the stolen gold.

Sig realizes that their only hope lies in his father’s beloved Colt revolver, hidden in the storeroom near the cabin. Although Sig’s mother and stepmother were both devout, nonviolent women who hated the revolver, Sig’s father called it, “the most beautiful thing in the world…after your sister, and your dear mother, that is…. things can be “beautiful from the inside, because of what they can do.” In the remarkable passage that follows, Sig’s father describes exactly how a gun works and shows his children how to shoot. In his words, it is indeed a beautiful thing, although, as Anna says, “what happen when the bullet hits something? Someone, I mean. That’s not beautiful. That’s terrible.”

Gradually, Sig comes up with a plan for using his father’s revolver to defeat Wolff, while at the same time honoring his mother’s pacifism. Teens who like the books of Gary Paulsen and Jack London will love “Revolver.” It’s a quick read, but the questions it raises—truth-telling versus deceit, faith versus action, violence versus pacifism—will stick with you for a long time.

Originally published in The News-Gazette, Sunday, June 5, 2011.

I'm BAAACK!

I can't believe my previous post was dated February 14, 2009! Well, actually, I can. A lot has changed since then, and I've decided it's time to give blogging a go again. I have three new books on forensic science coming out this fall, and I wanted to be able to tell you all about them. I hope that all of my old readers will come back, and that I'll get some new ones as well.

I have a new website (see the link at the right), which I hope you'll check out. I discovered that for some reason websites created with iWeb often are not correctly formatted (or sometimes not at all) on the Chrome browser, so I decided to switch to a free website creator called Weebly . So far I'm pretty happy with it. Let me know what you think.

Every three weeks I write a review of YA books for our local newspaper, The News-Gazette. I had all of my book reviews posted on my old website's blog; eventually I hope to transfer them all to this blog. I'll start with the most recent and work my way back.

Creative genius

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything across Italy, India and Indonesia, invites us to think of the concept as genius as the ancients did. Geniuses are not people, but rather more like a muse. We all have a genius; the trick is to learn how to capture it. Watch this TED talk when you feel that the well of creativity is running dry. (Oh, and she's funny, too.)

Saying goodbye

Our local independent bookstore, Pages for All Ages, held their going out of business sale beginning today at 10 a.m. I happened to have a flexible morning, so I went over there at 10 after hitting the gym. And stood in line to get in. It was swamped; and I'd be tempted to say, "Where were all of you before when it mattered?" but I could tell that most everyone HAD been here before. It just wasn't enough, I guess.

Many of us had gift cards purchased for Christmas or Hannukah; we all wanted to cash in on those. But it was more than that; this was a local independent going down, and those of us who could wanted to be there to say goodbye.

The lines to purchase our discounted books and merchandise were long, but we had no idea how long. I got into line around 11:45. By 1:30 I had become friends with my line-mates: a school librarian, two college students, and a woman named Gail. At some point we realized the utter foolishness of standing in line for hours to get a 40% discount (50% for CDs, 70% magazines). Surely our time was worth more than that. But by that time a curious line psychology had set in: once you've been waiting in line to 1.5 hours, you're willing to stick it out because by god you don't want to say you wasted an hour and a half in line for nothing. So you stick it out for twice that time, and more.


One good Samaratin brought in a plate of cheese to share:

By 3:30 we discussed getting a bottle of wine from Friar Tuck's down the street. By 4:25 I was checked out, having spent my gift card and then some, and the day with some complete strangers that I now think of as line friends. Think about it: I didn't have to stand in line this long to see Obama in Springfield when he announced Biden as his running mate. Sigh.

Goodbye, Pages, our last major independent bookseller. We'll miss you.

A wild and curly scarf

Crocheting things for my daughters this Christmas reminded me how much I enjoy making things with a hook and yarn. I made Alison a spiral scarf using a beautiful soft white wool/silk blend; I thought it turned out pretty well (although shorter than I would have liked), so I decided to make something similar with bold, bright colors. Unlike Alison's scarf, it's not subtle:

In fact, Alison said it reminded her of a sea slug. I've decided to take that as a compliment, as sea slugs are very interesting creatures. It's made out of 100% cotton yarn, which means that it's stiffer and holds the curl better than the silk/wool blend. Of course, the stiffness also means that it's less comfy and the fact that it's cotton makes it less warm.

In writing-related news, I'm wondering what the National Academy of Sciences report on the quality of forensic science as practiced in the nation's crime labs (hint: it's not good) will have on my upcoming forensic science books. It was a front-page article in the NYT.