The Prince and Betty by P.G. WodehouseMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Would stand up fairly well as a modern adventure-romance plot, except that there are a number of instances in which characters (including the hero) use offensive ethnic epithets.
Unlike Wodehouse's better-known work, this has tension and stakes beyond social embarrassment; there are New York gangsters (including the cat-loving and sympathetic leader of the East Side gang), investigative journalism exposing a slumlord, and (as in Jill the Reckless) a heroine from a wealthy background forced by circumstances to earn a precarious living in New York.
In this case, "circumstances" are her own principles; both the hero and heroine are highly principled, which makes their fairly lightly-sketched attraction much more believable to me than is the case in many other romance books.
It's funny, but it's also suspenseful, and engages with issues of the day and with the realities of poverty to at least a small degree, rather than living in a privileged, politically unaware fantasyland like so many Wodehouse novels. I'm enjoying these early works of his more than I expected to.
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