Eleven on Top, Ten Big Ones, To the Nines, Hard Eight . . .

[lightreads]

Fiction. Trouble-magnet bounty hunter Stephanie Plum chases fugitives, blows up cars, attracts homicidal maniacs, and regularly fucks up her love life. Rereads. I picked up the last one as a bit of a pallet cleanser, and ended up barreling through the entire series backwards. These are ungodly funny books with sparkling dialogue and characters drawn with comic boldness. For all that, these books manage to take themselves seriously to just the right degree, slipping in moments of fear and tenderness and familial outrage. The romances are funny and sometimes sizzling, the supporting cast strong, and everything always comes out okay in the end. Someone, I don't remember who, once complained to me about the female protagonist being such a professional screw-up (she sorta forgets to load her gun all the time) and so I went looking for feminist and other analyses. Unfortunately, I found them. It's a crap argument -- she fails to live up to male standards of kickassedness, so she's a bad female protagonist because those are the standards that really matter, and good female protagonists do it just like the boys do. And men can be screw-ups, but wymyn can't because it's just really bad wymyn PR, yo. Never mind that said protagonist has an uncanny instinct for tracing people and the tenacity of a mad dog. *shakes head*. It's good light reading that'll lift your spirits, and that's about as analytical as I want to get.