A Book A Week: The Last Little Blue Envelope by Maureen Johnson

The Last Little Blue Envelope by Maureen Johnson. HarperCollins EPub Edition, 2011

This book is a sequel to 13 Little Blue Envelopes, which I talked about here, and it might have been the first eBook I read from beginning to end. Maybe.

I really like Maureen Johnson’s stories. The tattered remnants of the adolescent I once was can relate to her protagonists as real people who do not fit into cookie-cutter teenager/young adult media molds, and for that I’m grateful. The mom in me is also grateful for books with three-dimensional characters who are sometimes a little nerdy and sometimes a little awkward, but who are also clever and emotionally complicated. I read this one on the heels of Sonar X11, who read 13 Little Blue Envelopes and The Last Little Blue Envelope in one weekend. For a kid who normally goes in for fantasy, I was happily surprised that he liked these books so much. Don’t let those glossy, gossipy, weirdly-stereotyped covers of Maureen Johnson books fool you (she probably didn’t choose those anyway). Inside are characters that are engaging and cool regardless of the reader’s gender. I think Sonar X11 had wild fantasies of going to Europe by himself after reading them. That kind of inspiration can’t hurt, and Johnson makes that kind of whim feel more than possible.

I was worried that this sequel would be a sort of mish-mash of all the stuff everyone wished had happened in the first book. But I was happily surprised there too. Johnson let’s her main character, Ginny, get her heart broken and get over it in fine form as she seeks to finish the scavenger hunt created by her dead aunt. Ginny’s expectations and assumptions (like mine) are challenged and she matures in bittersweet and smart ways. The search for the art and for a sense of her aunt become secondary to Ginny’s search for herself and the kind of person she wants to be in the world. I’m also pretty sure that one of the guys in this story looks and walks just like the Tenth Doctor. You figure out which one.