So for a very long time, I was very much against reading anything by Janet Evanovich. Mostly it was because of my library page weirdness, and since she has about a million books on the shelf, I had to hate her on principle.
But one day in the summer before I went to college, for reasons that I for the life of me cannot remember, decided to try her out. I read One for the Money in about two days, and I was hooked. I managed to get though books 2 and 3 of the Stephanie Plum series, but after that I started college and well, you know how that goes. It wasn't until the beginning of last year that I decided to make it my goal to finish the series. That was when I decided to get on the reserve list at the library for Sizzling Sixteen, and that gave me the incentive to catch up. So from January to June, I read the first 15 books in the series. So by the time I actually read Sizzling Sixteen, I was a little burnt out on the whole series. But Janet Evanovich only releases one book in this series per year, so I figured a year's absence would make my heart grow fonder. Or at the very least, less burnt out.
As the release of Smokin' Seventeen approached, I'll admit, I got excited. It's nice to have a new book to look forward to! But when I read it, I began to realize something: I'm kind of over it.
Don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed the book. Had a few laughs here or there, and I was interested in the main storyline (although I had the killer picked out practically the page after he was introduced, but this isn't Agatha Christie here or anything, so I don't really expect to be surprised by the mystery of the book). But...it was just a little same old, same old.
What's irritating me about these books is that they're all starting to feel like the same book. Stephanie gets herself into trouble and doesn't listen to advice from anyone, she and Lula try to catch an FTA or two and it goes horribly awry, Grandma Mazur causes trouble at a funeral, and Stephanie continues to agonize over the great Morelli vs. Ranger debate. Oh, and whoever the killer is decides to try and kill Stephanie because she's too nosy. To be quite honest, books 11-17 all run together because they're essentially the same book. Look, I give all the credit in the world to Janet Evanovich. She has unfailingly released a book about this character every year since 1995. That's impressive. She's discovered a formula for literary success, and power to her for that. But it seems like she's stuck in a rut. She's sticking to that formula to a T.
And honestly, I'm getting a little tired of it. Stephanie makes no progress a person. And look, I get that this isn't Literature with a capital "L", but that doesn't mean there can't be some development. Is Evanovich afraid that if she actually makes Stephanie get married or have a kid or move in with someone that the series is going to go to hell? The Moonlighting Curse does not not apply to books. Seriously, I'm real tired of this Morelli vs. Ranger crap. Stephanie is a grown-ass woman. Choosing a man shouldn't be this hard--especially when Morelli is the most obvious choice on the face of the earth.
OH MY GOD, THE STEPHANIE PLUM SERIES IS SUFFERING FROM THE REVERSE MOONLIGHTING CURSE!!! (The Reverse Moonlighting Curse, by the way, is when a series suffers when the two leads DON'T get together. See: the first half of season 6 of Bones). Seriously, if I have to deal with this high school relationship dramaz for another book...this whole relationship is just stagnating. If I want to read the exact same book over and over, I'll just read the first one, because that one is still, in my mind, far and away the best one.
I guess the last straw for me was the ending of this book: Stephanie has received a plane ticket to Thailand and enough money to purchase a second ticket for the man of her choice. She decides who she's going to take with her, but we as the readers don't know who that is. Which would be a great cliffhanger and all, if the EXACT same thing hadn't happened at the end of High Five. Seriously. At the end of that one, Stephanie has called a man over to her apartment, but we don't find out who it is until the next book. So that just means that 11 BOOKS LATER, she's in the exact same place. Dear God in heaven. I thought that maybe it seemed worse for me because I had read all the books in a row, but then I realize it's probably worse for people who have been reading the series since the beginning (having watched Bones from the very first episode, I can attest that the longer you've been waiting for something to happen in a fictional setting, the more frustrated you get when it doesn't happen. So I can only imagine).
It's this same reason that I've kind of gotten away from the Shopaholic series by Sophie Kinsella. I really enjoyed it in the beginning, and even though each of the books has a completely different scenario, they actually all have the same plot. Becky never learns any semblance of self control. I mean, even just reading the synopsis for Mini Shopaholic, I can tell that it's going to be the same story: Becky can't help herself, and this gets her into all kinds of trouble with Luke, but in the end she pulls it all together and saves the day. At the beginning of the series, Becky was poor and living in a crappy apartment with no boyfriend, and now she's married with a kid. But she's still doing the EXACT same things she did back in the day? You can see how that would be frustrating.
Sigh. Like I said, I still enjoyed the book. But I'm starting to feel like I'm only reading the Stephanie Plum series out of obligation instead of because I actually WANT to. At the very least, I'm only glad there's one of these a year. Okay, not THIS year, since Explosive Eighteen comes out in October, but still. Maybe it's because I'm still coming out of my bitter old lady reading mood. But it's still a little sad, because I reallly did enjoy the series quite a bit.
But I'm not giving it up for lost. Things can change. I mean, one can only hope.
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