Review: Plum Lovin'

Plum Lovin' by Janet Evanovich

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I listened to this on audio. It was meant to be a fluffy palate-cleansing sort of read, and it most certainly accomplished that. I wouldn't say it accomplished anything more.

The story was much shorter and less complicated than the numbered volumes. In this, Diesel returns to inform Stephanie that she has to take over for matchmaker Annie Hart, who Stephanie has been trying to track down with no luck. Along the way, she meets skeezy pawn brokers, aged mob bosses, and the usual cast of nutty characters, who lose some of their charm for being crammed into this light piece.

I noted in a review of one of the earlier books that I thought Stephanie's strength was in her willingness to help out and fix the situations that got people bonded out in the first place. I'd been growing impatient with how this is often used as a liability in more recent books. I was glad to see that it became an asset in this book, and that she got to really shine. None of her matchmaking quests went as she expected (though I saw the pairing-off as cliche and inevitable from the start), but they all ended well.

Unfortunately, a lot of the things that irritate me about the Stephanie Plum books were in this, as well. There was the parade of weirdos marching through Stephanie's life for no purpose except comic relief, there was the sexy guy inexplicably attracted to Stephanie and hitting on her relentlessly, and there were a lot of incidents where logic took a back seat. There's a wedding by a justice of the peace in this book, and, though the justice witnesses the guy's being threatened with being zapped by a stun gun and the guy never says, "I do," apparently the wedding is legal. I guess it wouldn't have been as funny if he had, or something. And I could've done without Lula's weight having a number attached. Her characterization is insulting enough without the knowledge her BMI is lower than mine.

I'm just going to pretend that Stephanie had an allergic reaction, overdosed on Benadryl, and dreamed this whole book to explain all the weird changes she found when she woke up. It's less weird for me that way.



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