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Explosive Eighteen (Stephanie Plum, #18)

Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich

My rating: 1 of 5 stars

…And no. I didn't read this one on a plane, so it was a total disaster. I was grinding my teeth by the time the book set up an extended joke to explain that the heroine is having bad mojo because she -- gasp! -- slept with two guys. (If you were wondering, the bad mojo goes away when she swears off sex.) But the worst part is, this book isn't even successfully managing the slut-shaming agenda the author has been subliminally and explicitly dishing out for years. I mean, to really tell a story about actions and consequences, which this one specifically claims to be doing, where a woman is punished for owning her sexual desires and acting on them . . . yeah . . . first you have to write a story where a woman owns her sexual desires and acts on them. And Evanovich cannot do that. There is not a single character here who acts out of personal volition. The heroine explained last book that she's "acting slutty" because someone put a curse on her. You guys, she can't even pretend to own it, it is so fucking sad. I can't even really get pissed about the shape of the meta narrative here, because it's not punishing her for finally growing a pair and getting what she wants, since i>she didn't do that. We get a replay of the same plot in this book where her friend accidentally drinks something that makes her fall for this dude, and it's played for -- I just -- I am running out of words, I can't even.

And it's not even funny! The shot-in-the-foot joke was funny exactly one-and-a-half times, and this is, like, number five!

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