The Last Little Blue Envelope
Jul. 11th, 2014 10:50 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearThis is the sequel to 13 Little Blue Envelopes by Maureen Johnson, and picks up the story a few months after the end of the first book. The last envelope has been found, so Ginny sets off back to Europe to follow its instructions.
It's quite a fun conceit and the adventure of the trip is entertaining, but I do find the romantic aspects of the book quite troubling. The two guys who join Ginny in her adventure are Keith, a fickle B&E expert, and Oliver, an arrogant blackmailer - and she falls for them one after the other.
Keith's flaws are brushed over as unimportant because they end up just friends, and Oliver's actions are mitigated by his last-minute change of heart and revealed not-so-terrible motivations. But still, not exactly stellar boyfriend material, in my view, either of them...
And the accents - oh, the accents! They're actually even worse in this audiobook (same narrator) because the two guys have to be distinct from one another, so Keith turns Cockney Irish and Oliver gets the stilted, sort-of-British monstrosity of an accent that Keith had in the first book. Gah! I mean, I'm awful at accents, and I'm sure it must be difficult to get them right for stuff like this, but employing a narrator with some kind of talent in the area really ought to be mandatory.
Still, quite fun overall.
It's quite a fun conceit and the adventure of the trip is entertaining, but I do find the romantic aspects of the book quite troubling. The two guys who join Ginny in her adventure are Keith, a fickle B&E expert, and Oliver, an arrogant blackmailer - and she falls for them one after the other.
Keith's flaws are brushed over as unimportant because they end up just friends, and Oliver's actions are mitigated by his last-minute change of heart and revealed not-so-terrible motivations. But still, not exactly stellar boyfriend material, in my view, either of them...
And the accents - oh, the accents! They're actually even worse in this audiobook (same narrator) because the two guys have to be distinct from one another, so Keith turns Cockney Irish and Oliver gets the stilted, sort-of-British monstrosity of an accent that Keith had in the first book. Gah! I mean, I'm awful at accents, and I'm sure it must be difficult to get them right for stuff like this, but employing a narrator with some kind of talent in the area really ought to be mandatory.
Still, quite fun overall.
