Lean Mean Thirteen by Janet Evanovich

Aug 20, 2007 23:01

I really haven't been so much at one with the fiction reading lately! Gotta get on that. :D


9.
Title: Lean Mean Thirteen
Author: Janet Evanovich
Pages: 310
Year of Publication: 2007
Genre: Fiction -- literature
Grade: B+
Finished on: 20 August 2007

The Stephanie Plum books are totally my comfort books. I know pretty much exactly what I'm getting out of them, and while there's a different mystery every time, there's never really any huge changes in the characters or the character dynamics. I guess there's been a gradually-developing arc of the Stephanie/Ranger/Morelli love triangle, but in this book especially it was pretty clear that there weren't going to be any huge changes there. Everyone loves Stephanie, everyone's cool with each other. I have an astonishing lack of interest in Ranger/Morelli, which is kind of weird; normally two guys having the hots for the same chick would have me slashing them all OVER the place, especially since Ranger and Morelli are both hotasses. In this case though, I think I am much more at one with the Ranger/me and Morelli/me, which might explain the disinterest.

Anyway, nobody's going to argue that the Stephanie Plum novels are high literature or anything, but I was paying even less attention than usual while reading this one. That's not to say there isn't redeeming value in it, because there totally is. Grandma Mazur is lovely as always; there's an amusing running gag related to the cable company; and some events with an amateur taxidermist had me howling with laughter. Overall, though, very light reading.

Although actually, I found myself paying a good bit of attention to Evanovich's writing style, which I never really had before, and dude, she does some weird stuff with tense-shifting. It's not actually incorrect, and it's not errors she's making; it's just weird purposeful choices, like describing things that are constants throughout the series in the present tense (something like, "I live in a redbrick apartment just outside of the Burg") when the rest of the book is in the simple past. It kind of threw me off when I noticed it. Also, what does it say about me that I've read the previous twelve books in the series and totally never noticed her doing this before? Heh.

I also kind of wanted her to describe action sequences in more detail. And dude, Stephanie gets stun-gunned SO MANY TIMES in this book. Three or four times in the first eighty pages, yo. Between that and a number of panic attacks, at least one of which was snake-related, I'm amazed that Stephanie remembered anything at all that happened to her during the course of the novel, considering the number of times Evanovich wrote something like, "ZAP. The next thing I remembered, I was in my car."

Heh, I am WORDY about this book, wow! Important thing to remember, really: Evanovich's books are fun as long as you go into them expecting comfort reading and not high lit. :D

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