Summer Lightning

Rating:
Summary: More Piggish Capers at Blandings Castle
Review:
Summer Lightning is one of the several delightful books in the Blandings Castle series by P.G. Wodehouse. Summer Lightning is better than many other P.G. Wodehouse books in that the plot and character development are more thorough than most which keeps the fun going longer.

Clarence, the ninth Earl of Emsworth, is at home in his castle in Shropshire where he dotes on his famous prize-winning pig, the Empress of Blandings. Having dispatched his earlier secretary, Baxter, Clarence is at peace contemplating how his pig will win again when he learns from his brother Galahad (Gally) that the neighbor's pig man is offering 3:1 odds against the Empress. Clarence and Gally presume that their neighbor, Sir Gregory Parsloe is planning to knobble the Empress. Their worst fears are borne out when the Empress disappears!

At the same time, Parsloe lives in fear that Gally will publish old stories about his wild younger days in Gally's new book. Clarence's and Gally's sister Connie wants to stop publication as well. Soon the castle is overrun with manuscript thieves!

At the same time, love is in the air. Clarence's new secretary, Hugo Carmody, is secretly and unsuitably in love with Millicent Threepwood, niece to Clarence, Connie and Gally, and Millicent is in love with him. But they need to get some financial help to pull off the merger.

Ronald Fish, a wealthy young man whose money is tied with Clarence, is also in love with an unsuitable person . . . one Sue Brown who is a chorus girl. Ronnie has proven himself to be a poor judge of investments in the past, and Clarence is skeptical of allowing any more money. It doesn't help when Clarence finds that Ronnie doesn't truly share his love of pigs!

Will love win out? Of course! It's a P.G. Wodehouse book. But before love wins, humor will take the day in many silly scenes worthy of Shakespeare's best in the forest of Arden.

Rating:
Summary: The best of Wodehouse
Review: Summer Lightening is the best Wodehouse novel, introducing many elements for the first time reader which reappear in many other Blandings Castle books. The major elements are: the prize pig called Empress of Blandings, a secretary named Baxter who is very intelligent but not liked by Lord Emsworth, who is the family head but detests everything except the pig, his younger brother Galahad, who is at peak of health by avoiding all healthy stuff, and their imperial sisters who control everyone around them. Read the book and savour.

Rating:
Summary: Blandings at its best, with the arrival of Gally
Review: The Hon. Galahad Threepwood, younger brother of Lord Emsworth, is at Blandings Castle writing his memoirs, much to the consternation of their sister, Lady Constance Keeble, and many blue-blooded neighbors. Amid this, young love becomes repeatedly unstuck, imposters arrive, Baxter returns, and The Empress of Blandings is stolen. All seems lost, until ...

This may be the best of the Blandings series. It introduced Gally, a charming, disreputable younger son of an Earl whose main crimes are enjoying life and refusing to be a snob. He's an older gentleman who is rarely without a whisky in his hand or a story on his lips. If you've never read Wodehouse's Blandings books, this is a good place to start, followed by its sequel, Heavy Wather.