Plum Fun

Some of my blogging buds, Virginia, Darcie, and Melissa (hi, girls!) goaded me into starting on Janet Evanovich’s series of eighteen books about a New Jersey bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum.

I’m hooked. Perhaps even addicted, with no desire to enter recovery.

Evanovich started the books back in the 90s, so she pre-dated many of the bounty hunter series on TV. Being a bounty hunter gives Stephanie many opportunities for danger, excitement, and “don’t taze me, Bro” Jersey-style fun.

To me, the series is about Stephanie, the woman, more than anything else. The plots are secondary and are just to keep my pal Stephanie busy between buying her latest used car (she tends to destroy one or more motor vehicles per book), going shoe shopping, changing her hairstyle, or deciding which of the two men in her life she’s lusting for this week.

In Seven Up, she once again leaves her gun stashed in her cookie jar at home, when she should have taken it to work. Stephanie regularly finds herself covered in goo, picking week-old spaghetti out of her hair after chasing a Failure to Appear/bond jumper through back alleys and dumpsters. Kudos to Evanovich for including inconsequential, goofy details like this to make Stephanie a girl I’d like to sit down and have a pizza with. After she showers and changes, of course.

Steph is one mixed up chick. She’s an adrenaline junkie; she regularly mooches dinner off her parents. She talks to her pet hamster, Rex. She likes the old people who live in her apartment building and knows their names. She loves New Jersey:  smog, hairspray, belligerent drivers and all.

She can’t figure out whether she should give it all up, and marry her childhood love, Joe Morelli. Should she get married, settle down, and have kids? Nah, not this week.

More Tastycakes than high literature, if you pick up a Plum escapade don’t expect to find Stephanie or her friends  pondering the meaning of life. Not going to happen. Purely escape fiction, a great beach read-- the series may be like candy, or better yet like the greasy Pino’s pizza Steph favors, but I for one need a few carbs to get me through life’s rough patches.

And life is like a slice of pizza, no?

Crunchy on the bottom, a little burnt, messy, spicy, but ultimately filling. And sometimes gives us bloat.