smokin' Seventeen by Janet Evanovich

Smokin' Seventeen by Janet Evanovich

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Read on the Los Angeles - Kauai leg of a really long day. Ideal in those circumstances, less so under any other, I suspect. I realize I'm about to do the thing where I take a book far far more seriously than it takes itself, but I stopped feeling weird about that a long time ago because I'm perfectly happy believing books matter as much as I think they do, even silly fluffy slapsticky romcoms about accident prone bounty hunters.

So the thing is, this is a book in which the heroine does exactly what I've been pleading with her to do for the past ten books, and starts hooking up with both the men in her life, instead of just endlessly waffling. Except she does it in the most irresponsible way possible. There are ways to sleep with two people at once -- to have a serious but open relationship with one and a long-standing fling with the other -- in a way that everyone can feel good about at the end of the day. …This isn't it. This is someone completely failing to take responsibility for herself or her actions, or to make decisions like a grown up, who repeatedly slut-shames herself into feeling awful no matter what she does. It wasn't about progress or -- don't make me laugh -- personal empowerment. It was just setup for drama and what I suspect will be a very fast monogamy reset button.

…So pretty good plane reading, then.




View all my reviews

Explosive Eighteen by Janet Evanovich

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!




View all my reviews