13 Little Blue Envelopes

About the 13 Little Blue Envelopes series

When her free-spirited Aunt Peg dies of cancer, seventeen-year-old Ginny Blackstone receives a mysterious package: thirteen blue envelopes, each one to be opened only after she completes the task set out in the one before it. The envelopes send her, alone and with no set itinerary, on a scavenger-hunt tour of Europe -- London, Paris, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Rome, Greece -- following the trail her aunt once walked herself, with each stop peeling back another layer of who Peg really was and why she left home so suddenly years earlier.

Maureen Johnson wrote 13 Little Blue Envelopes before backpacking-Europe YA was a crowded genre, and its loose, unplanned structure -- Ginny has no phone, no fixed plan, and often no idea what she's doing next -- became a template a lot of later travel novels borrowed from. The sequel, The Last Little Blue Envelope, picks up after the original ended on a genuine cliffhanger (the thirteenth envelope goes missing before Ginny can open it), and sends her back to Europe with a boy who claims to have found it, forcing her to reckon with unfinished business from the first book while retracing Peg's route one final time.

At its core this is a coming-of-age story about grief, independence, and what you inherit from the adults who shaped you, dressed up as a whirlwind European travelogue.

How to read this series

Read in order -- 13 Little Blue Envelopes ends on a cliffhanger that The Last Little Blue Envelope exists specifically to resolve, so treat the pair as one story split into two books rather than a standalone plus an optional sequel.