Big Girl Panties by Stephanie Evanovich

 Big Girl Panties

by Stephanie Evanovich 

My Rating: 🟊🟊🟊

Spice Rating: 🌶🌶

Blurb:

Big Girl Panties by Stephanie Evanovich is a rollicking and poignant romantic comedy about a young widow who decides to get in shape...and winds up getting her groove back--and a whole lot more! Holly Brennan used food to comfort herself through her husband's illness and death. Now she's alone at age thirty-two. And she weighs more than she ever has. When fate throws her in the path of Logan Montgomery, personal trainer to pro athletes, and he offers to train her, Holly concludes it must be a sign. Much as she dreads the thought of working out, Holly knows she needs to put on her big girl panties and see if she can sweat out some of her grief. Soon, the easy intimacy and playful banter of their training sessions lead Logan and Holly to most intense and steamy workouts. But can Holly and Logan go the distance as a couple now that she's met her goals--and other men are noticing?

My Review:

Big Girl Panties by Stephanie Evanovich, I Wanted to Love This and I Am FRUSTRATED That I Didn't Fully Get There!

Let me tell you how this book ended up in my hands, I was on a mission to actually READ my physical TBR instead of just letting it collect dust and look pretty on my shelves. Big Girl Panties made the cut and I went in with genuine hope and an open heart. The premise pulled me in immediately, a woman navigating grief, learning to trust again, finding herself in the most unexpected places. That is the kind of story that should have had me SOBBING and cheering in equal measure. And parts of it did. But then other parts had me putting the book down to collect myself for entirely different reasons!

Let's start with what worked because there IS good here. Watching the FMC slowly lower her walls and let someone in after losing her husband was genuinely beautiful. The friendship that bloomed between them before anything romantic developed felt real and tender and earned. Grief is heavy and complicated and isolating and this book captured that truth in ways that genuinely moved me. Watching her learn to trust again, to let someone see her and stay, that part of their story was everything!

But then there is the other side of this book and I need to talk about it because it sat in my stomach like a stone the entire time I was reading!

The mansplaining. OH the mansplaining. The absolute audacity of a man deciding he knows better, deciding that the body someone is living in makes them less worthy of basic human decency, genuinely turned my stomach. The idea that you could look at another human being and reduce them entirely to the SIZE of the body they are carrying around BAFFLES me. It enrages me. Because bodies are just bodies. They are the vessels we exist in and not a single one of them determines a person's worth, their lovability, or their right to take up space in this world!

And the fetishization, I cannot let that go without saying something. There is a way to write a plus size FMC with love and care and intention. A way that honors her fullness as a person rather than treating her body as either a problem to be fixed or an exotic thing to be desired DESPITE herself. This book walked a very uncomfortable line and more than once crossed it in ways that made me wince!

Then, THEN, having everyone around her constantly remind her that she isn't his type like she hadn't already looked at him with her own two eyes and figured that out herself?! She KNOWS. She has always known. She did not need a single person to pull her aside and explain that to her like she was missing something obvious. That was not concern, that was cruelty dressed up as caring and it drove me absolutely up the wall!

Did I hate this book? No. There is a story underneath all of that discomfort that genuinely has heart. But it needed so much more decorum, so much more intentionality, and so much more RESPECT for its leading lady than it ultimately delivered. She deserved better from the people around her and honestly,  she deserved better from the book itself.

I am choosing to believe she knew her worth the entire time even when no one else in those pages did. 👏🔥