Repost, slightly edited. This book was a disappointment when I read it in 2012, but I've just now found out there's a sequel, and perhaps I expected too much of it before, so I may give it another shot, hence, I'm re uploading this review without the rating.
Original Review:
When this book floated across my GR feed and I saw "weasel" in the title, naturally I had to look closer.
Now it will probably help to understand that I love P.G. Wodehouse, and have done ever since I first encountered him by way of the television adaptation of his Jeeves stories Jeeves and Wooster with Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie over twenty years ago. And ever since that first encounter I've been wishing for a gay P.G. Wodehouse novel.
The description of Pop Goes The Weasel, complete with manor house, matchmaking, unintentional engagement, and relations forcing the the characters to participate in schemes of dubious legality, pretty much screams P.G. Wodehouse. So hopeful, yet skeptical, after attempting to get friends to screen it for me, I opened the sample...
And what do you know, the opening scene is exactly the sort of thing one can imagine a gay Bertie Wooster finding himself in, and while the style is not P.G Wodehouse, it seemed very suited to an American version of Bertie and after all, I felt, attempting to actually imitate Wodehouse's prose would only invite negative comparison when the author inevitably failed to live up to the master. So with reckless abandon I bought it and started to read.
For the first few chapters all was well. There were some particularly funny lines. Describing me as giddy would not have been inappropriate. The characters had potential and the setup was good, but after about the 9% mark I began to be somewhat bored. Why? The situations were perfect, the plot was what I'd expected, indeed in Wodehouse's hands I would have been laughing non-stop at these same scenarios. Yet I felt nothing. And I think a large part of the problem is that the characters really didn't seem to feel anything either. Oh they expressed verbal dissatisfaction, but I never felt as if any of them were at all emotionally invested in the outcome of events, and consequently, neither was I. It was so flat I found myself occasionally chuckling at things that really weren't very funny. As if I wanted to laugh and so I would at the few measurable bumps in the monotony. And it wasn't as if the characters were unlikable, the narrative voice simply delivered the story devoid of any real emotion.
I really wanted to like this book. This book wanted to be the book I've been hoping for for twenty years, but it failed. There was a twinge of humour in the incredibly unsexy sex scene, and I felt a touch of the success of the beginning again at the climax when all was explained and set right. Of course the book kept going after that, filling out another chapter with a pointless, uninteresting epilogue.
So in the end I'm giving this [x] stars. I may try something else by the author, I'm not sure. I'm still hoping for that gay Wodehouse one of these days.