Wodehouse never disappoints! If you haven't had the pleasure, the best I can do is to compare him to Oscar Wilde - they both write the sorts of stories that involve bright young things exchanging dazzlingly witty dialog and getting themselves entangling in preposterous situations that are only in the end untangled by a combination of luck and cleverness.
In this outing, Wodehouse supplies us with not one but two seemingly doomed romances, the first between Hugh Carmody, secretary to wealthy Lord Emsworth and Emsworth's haughty daughter Millicent, the second between Ronnie Fish, Emsworth's ne'er-do-well nephew and Sue, a self-possessed chorus girl. Now throw in Galahad Emsworth, who's writing a tell-all bio destined to embarrass most of England's peerage; Pilbeam, a comical private detective; Parsloe-Parsloe, a blustering neighbor; Baxter, Emsworth's former secretary, who has an odd propensity for falling out of windows; Beach, the unflappable butler - mix generously with a convoluted plot involving attempted larceny, impersonation, flower-pot throwing, and a particularly nefarious pig-napping - and you get this froth of a confection: bright, clever, breezy, and laugh-out-loud funny. (Honest to goodness, I almost choked trying not to burst out laughing in my doctor's waiting room.)
Absolutely PERFECT beach reading, though I make a point of reading Wodehouse year-round because there's never a time when a bit of humor isn't just what the doctor ordered.
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