3.5★
A fun romp but not as hilarious as some of his books.

2019 reread via LibriVox audiobook: no change in my opinion expressed above. ( )

While funny and charming, it mostly lacks Wodehouse's characteristic wordplay. That leaves just a shallow story.

> There he sat, placidly eating toast and marmalade, while the boat-train containing Lady Underhill already sped on its way from Dover to London. It was like Drake playing bowls with the Spanish Armada in sight.

> "Topping!" he said spaciously. "No other word for it. All wool and a yard wide. Precisely as mother makes it. You look like a thingummy." "How splendid. All my life I've wanted to look like a thingummy, but somehow I've never been able to manage it." "A wood-nymph!" exclaimed Freddie, in a burst of unwonted imagery.

> Jill reached the scene of battle, and, stopping, eyed Henry with a baleful glare. We, who have seen Henry in his calmer moments and know him for the good fellow he was, are aware that he was more sinned against than sinning. If there is any spirit of justice in us, we are pro-Henry. In his encounter with Bill the parrot, Henry undoubtedly had right on his side. His friendly overtures, made in the best spirit of kindliness, had been repulsed. He had been severely bitten. And he had lost half a pint of beer to Erb. As impartial judges we have no other course before us than to wish Henry luck and bid him go to it. But Jill, who had not seen the opening stages of the affair, thought far otherwise. She merely saw in Henry a great brute of a man poking at a defenceless bird with a stick.

> She turned to Freddie, who had come up at a gallop and was wondering why the deuce this sort of thing happened to him out of a city of six millions

> There will, no doubt, always be class distinctions. Sparta had her kings and her helots, King Arthur's Round Table its knights and its scullions, America her Simon Legree and her Uncle Tom. But in no nation and at no period of history has any one ever been so brutally superior to any one else as is the Broadway theatrical office-boy to the caller who wishes to see the manager. Thomas Jefferson held these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Theatrical office-boys do not see eye to eye with Thomas.

> Jill, like many other people, had a brain which was under the alternating control of two diametrically opposite forces. It was like a motor-car steered in turn by two drivers, the one a dashing, reckless fellow with no regard for the speed limits, the other a timid novice. All through the proceedings up to this point the dasher had been in command. He had whisked her along at a break-neck pace, ignoring obstacles and police regulations. Now, having brought her to this situation, he abruptly abandoned the wheel and turned it over to his colleague, the shrinker. Jill, greatly daring a moment ago, now felt an overwhelming shyness.

> She touched a chord in the young man which seemed to make the world a flower-scented thing, full of soft music. Often as he had been in love at first sight before in his time, Otis Pilkington could not recall an occasion on which he had been in love at first sight more completely than now. When she smiled at him, it was as if the gates of heaven had opened. He did not reflect how many times, in similar circumstances, these same gates had opened before; and that on one occasion when they had done so it had cost him eight thousand dollars to settle the case out of court. One does not think of these things at such times, for they strike a jarring note. Otis Pilkington was in love.

> The complexity of life began to weigh upon Freddie. Life was like one of those shots at squash which seem so simple till you go to knock the cover off the ball, when the ball sort of edges away from you and you miss it. Life, Freddie began to perceive, was apt to have a nasty back-spin on it.

> Mankind is divided into two classes—those who do setting-up exercises before breakfast and those who know they ought to but don't. To the former and more praiseworthy class Wally had belonged since boyhood. ( )

This boy raised a pair of pink-rimmed eyes to Jill, sniffed, bit his thumb-nail, and spoke. He was a snub-nosed boy. His ears and hair were vermilion. His name was Ralph. He had seven hundred and forty-three pimples. ( )

A thoroughly enjoyable Wodehouse book that I had not previously read. Jill is impulsive but very kind-hearted; to call her 'Reckless' seems a tad unfair. Perhaps the word has changed a little in meaning since the book was first published in 1920.

I found Jill a surprisingly realistic and likeable character who remains mostly positive and resourceful despite all kinds of problems and disasters around her. She is surrounded by more typical stereotyped Wodehouse characters, and deals well with all of them, whatever their class, or status, or income.

The action takes place in the upper classes of London and the chorus girls of a New York show, and Jill seems equally at home in both. Typical Wodehouse banter and unlikely situations, and a positive ending.

Highly recommended.

Full review here: https://suesbookreviews.blogspot.com/2019/08/jill-reckless-by-pg-wodehouse.html ( )

see The Little Warrior ( )