OPERATION DIMWIT

Penelope Lemon deals with some unusual problems at the trailer park.

A sequel to Penelope Lemon: Game On (2018) finds Majors’ plucky heroine still struggling to remain in the middle class, now working as a receptionist at Rolling Acres Estates, where the property owner is a kleptomaniac and also masturbates daily in the restroom attached to Penelope's office. Penelope and her boss, Missy, have noticed things disappearing from their desks, and they’re sure Dewitt, the owner, is taking them. “ ‘Listen,’ Missy said, popping off the couch like a submerged pool toy breaking the surface. ‘We’re going up there and finding our stuff. He’s probably eaten the candy and the gum. But those socks of yours? They’re hanging in a Hello Kitty frame in the sex dungeon beneath his trailer.’ ” While her son, Theo, is off at camp, Penelope expects to “live for two weeks as an unfettered badass single gal, as often depicted on television shows set in New York City,” but the realities of life in the backwater burg of Hillsboro, Virginia, will take things in a rather different direction. Majors' arch delivery makes the book amusing sentence by sentence, but this time the plot is a bit too silly to be resonant. One storyline revolves around a bidet and an aging online suitor named Fitzwilliam Darcy; a second deploys a personalized green-and-orange dildo and a rampaging squad of skunks. A more promising thread set at the gym, where Penelope runs into her ex-husband’s not-very-nice new girlfriend, lies about her athletic abilities, and gets asked out by a workout warrior, is set up but not sufficiently pursued. Perhaps the difference between the original book and this sequel is that the first deals with the absurdities of modern life and the second with the absurdities of, well, the absurd.

Not as funny as the first book, but if there’s a third, we’d give it a chance.