Peanut Butter and Stephanie Plum Jelly Sandwiches

Let's be honest. Even the best home cooks need a day off. The kind of day when even a grilled cheese sandwich is too much effort--those are the days for PB&J. No, it's not fancy. It's not creative or shocking or unexpected. But that's the beauty of PB&J. It is familiar, predictable, and everything that you hoped it would be--because you didn't hope for much. Even so, there's something inherently comforting about a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (unless of course your have a peanut allergy, then this post is clearly not for you).

Lying in bed about a week ago, pondering the beauty and simplicity of a good PB&J, I realized that I had a whole stack of PB&J books tucked away in my digital library. Sitting just inches away from my pillow, filling  up my precious Kindle space, 16 Stephanie Plum novels sat waiting for the day when I needed a simple, predictable, yet comfortingly familiar peanut butter and Stephanie Plum jelly novel. 

If you're not familiar with my favorite Jersey girl, Stephanie Plum is the disaster-prone brainchild of best-selling author Janet Evanovich. She's no Snookie; I doubt she could stomach the antics of "The Situation," and, in point of fact, I absolutely love that about her. While maintaining the hair, the trash (and trash talk) that makes Jersey, Jersey, Stephanie Plum somehow makes New Jersey palatable to a Southern girl that otherwise can't fathom that amount of stuffed cabbage and mob ties outside of The Godfather. On top of that, she's a hopelessly worthless bounty hunter who is perpetually broke, insanely lucky in love, and in possession of perhaps the fastest metabolism known to man--scarfing down scores of burgers, fries, shakes, meatball subs, greasy pizzas, doughnuts, and other various and sundry caloric devils in disguise in each chapter. Stephanie Plum novels are never going to garner the attention of literary critics in search of the next Jane Eyre, but I love them nonetheless. And this is coming from a girl who adores Jane Eyre. In fact, I think my favorite thing about the series is the simple fact that it freely relegates traditionally crucial story elements--like plot points, foreshadowing, symbolism, etc--to the margins and instead focuses on creating one of the most reader-relatable heroines I've encountered in years. She's no pinnacle of intelligence, class, decorum, or physical/mental health; she is, on the other hand, in one way or another, each and every woman I have every encountered. She craves doughnuts. She fails epically at dieting, and she makes mistake after agonizing mistake in her love life--something that her drives her poor mother to the sauce (marinara, gravy, alfredo, chianti, brandy, merlot, etc.) at least once in every novel.

But I digress. The main point here is that Stephanie Plum novels make me love this genre a little more than I used to. They made me realize that there is a place in the literary world for "light" reading, for comfortable reading, just like there's a place in my kitchen and my stomach for a good old peanut butter and jelly sandwich.