The Green Mouse by Robert W. Chambers

Description

The Green Mouse advertises its own charm like a marquee: “Showing the Value of a Helping Hand When It Is White and Slender.” Robert W. Chambers — the American bestseller who moved from fin-de-siecle occult stories to bright New York romances — here banks squarely on wit and warmth. His hero is a young man who has been decorously, chronically disturbed by a girl’s eyes since the first time he passed her, and when she finally appears at his door, the comedy of courtship begins in earnest.

The novel runs on the machinery of the American romantic comedy: rooms let next door, Erskine-esque dialogue, a chorus of aunts and rivals, and a series of situations that teeter between the ridiculous and the romantic. Chambers’s prose is light, quick, and endlessly quotable; his people talk the way New York in the early nineteen-hundreds liked to imagine itself talking — clever, kind, and never at a loss.

Beneath the sparkle, the book keeps a firm belief in the value of intervention. Its hero learns that love is not a spectator sport, and that the friends who meddle — the matchmakers, the busybodies, the well-meaning chaperones — are often the instruments of destiny. For readers of Wodehouse-style entanglements and seductive old New York alike, The Green Mouse is pure pleasure.

Why readers pick it up

• Chambers’s comic timing and his signature light, quotable dialogue.
• A romance as winsome as its famously whimsical title.
• An Edwardian New York that glimmers with the glow of its own optimism.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition brings you the complete text with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and chapter navigation tuned for phone, tablet, and e-reader.