If you're looking for another War of the Worlds or New Machiavelli you may not enjoy this as much, but if you read past the chirpy narrative (and heavily accented dialogue) you'll find Wells's wit as sharp and acerbic as usual. His prose is enjoyable and not overblown; by keeping the narrator apart from the characters Kipps is more sympathetic than he might have been otherwise - he's charmingly inoffensive, but he's better filtered through Wells's more knowledgable narrator. This is not a typical fish out of water story, avoiding the cringe-inducing moments such usually produce, but is a very enjoyable rags-to-riches tale. I thoroughly recommend it. ( )

I cannot evaluate the content of the novel. I stopped very early on because the Penguin classics edition irritated me. They added an absurd number of unnecessary footnotes, including notes for "Olympus" and "mortarboard," which merely explained what those words meant. A novel written in the early 1900s does not require 35 footnotes in the first chapter!

I found this clutter impossible to ignore. Avoid the Penguin classics edition.