The Masqueraders - Georgette Heyer

Heyer!  You are a fount of easy, fabulous reads!  I will be taking you to the beach with me from now on, you wacky dame.

So.  Robin and his sister Prudence wander into high society after a childhood/teens/early-twenties-in-Prudence's-case of adventuring, except that for absolutely no discernible reason whatsoever, they both go about as the opposite sex (ok, Robin is an escaped Jacobite and going as a woman is a clever disguise and one unlikely to be uncovered in this era [the era in which there were Jacobites, i.e. 1745], but Prudence as a man is completely unnecessary [although if Robin is going to be traveling around in petticoats he could use a male escort, so I guess it makes sense from a practical standpoint {but for actually, the reason is to allow hilarity to ensue}]). 

Hilarity ensues!  Robin and Prudence, as Kate and Peter (respectively), rescue the lovely heiress Letty, who is having Eloper's Remorse.  With the help of her lately-arrived family friend Anthony, they restore her to her worried papa.  In short order, Robin/Kate becomes very special friends with Letty, and Prudence/Peter is taken under Anthony's manly wing, and everybody falls in love with everybody because this is a regency romance.  Also, somewhere in there Robin and Prudence's conniving father is trying to get himself named Viscount, but that's sort of not the point of anything.  ROMANCE!

And the romantic shiz is remarkably free from ickiness.  This I can read, as it is mostly just people zinging other people, and then sometimes proposing and protesting.  My fears have been allayed: Heyer's romances are not awful.  However, however, despite the zany premise, it lacked the delightful looniness that so endeared me to Death in the Stocks.  Stocks is CHOCK FULL of winsome wtf-ery, whereas Masqueraders is maybe eight-ninths full.  Maybe the other ninth is the romance, I 'unno.

But the dialogue is smart and the adventures are completely nonsensical but somehow totally believable and the heaps of passive voice and 'egads's can be chalked either up to an attempt at historical tone or to this being only Heyer's 3rd novel.

Eight caterpillars.
Requisite ass-covering:
Thanks, Sourcebooks!