Honk! A Motor Romance

(from A. L. Burt dust jacket) Peter Van Kleeck, handsome young college professor, idol of his Economics class of coeds, knows exactly two girls in whose breasts his charms arouse no unwelcome response. When these two "safe and sane" damsels decide to pool their nest eggs and tour Europe, Peter Gladly throws in his lot with theirs, "chips in" on a French car, and becomes the leading spirit of the expedition. So the ridiculous cavalcade, composed of a slightly conceited young man and two girls in squash hats, tool blithely through the highways and byways of France, Spain, Italy and Switzerland, meeting with many ludicrous adventures. Romance pops into the tale, when, to the utter consternation of the Professor, they run across "Little Proctor," his most fiendish and most fascinating flapper student. In this fizzing motor novel, the author has given a new twist to stories of European travel, staging comedy and romance on a real background of French villages, Spanish castles and starry nights. Italian roads between ilexes and olives, with glimpses of a sky-blue Mediterranean.

Unreliable narrators are my jam, with early motor trips only slightly behind them, so Honk! really hit the spot. The narrator being the male lead is relatively unusual in a woman-written romance and she does it well. The fact that the "safe and sane" spinsters are 31 and the dashing young professor 30 rankles, but it's 1926. VK is delightfully clueless and the platonic friendships are a nice change of pace -- more fun, actually, than the romance.