Tallulah Casey is an ebullient, chaotic Irish girl and she's fizzing with excitement because she's returning to the perfect school  Dother Hall performing arts college, a crumbling mansion in Brontë country, where the teachers are engagingly barmy and there are endless opportunities to snog the boys at the school next door. "Hooray and chug-a-lug-a-doo-dah!!!!" as Tallulah puts it. "This is going to be my Winter of Love, I can tell."

Tallulah thinks about boys a lot; when I read A Midsummer Tights Dream it made me remember exactly how it felt to have crushes on any number of boys, without any real idea of what you wanted to do with them. Tallulah thinks she loves Alex, the boy from the local pub. But she's not sure how she feels about Charlie from the boys' school, with whom she had a failed snog last term, and she's strangely fascinated by Cain Hinchcliff, the darkly handsome village lout.

Louise Rennison's followup to Withering Tights, which won the Roald Dahl Funny prize, is a wonderful cocktail of slapstick and wish-fulfilment, spiked with just enough seriousness to make it more than forgettable froth. The adults here, as described by Tallulah's pitiless pen, are all determined eccentrics. Dother Hall (known to the locals as "Dither Hall") is run by Sidone Beaver, faded actress and monster of self-regard. She's abetted by an old luvvie called Monty, who sheathes his plump form in pink leotards and tells questionable anecdotes about his "friend" Biffo.

Tallulah is not a boarder at Dother Hall, but lodges with the amiable Dobbins in the village. This way she has easy access to the local boys, she's free to visit an adorable bunch of owlets in a nearby barn and she gets to avoid the worst discomforts of the school  the roof is full of holes and one of her friends wakes up to find a dead pigeon on her bedside table. Not that anyone cares about the dilapidation, or the general lack of organisation. Besides worrying about the smallness of her "corkers", Tallulah's biggest concern is that she has no obvious talent except "spontaneous Irish dancing"; what part will she get in Monty's customised version of A Midsummer Night's Dream? This is the one with Bottom, of course, and there are some very fine bum-jokes.

The "Tree Sisters" are Tallulah's special friends: Jo, Vaisey and Flossie. As they are the people who matter most to her, they are the funniest characters in the book  Flossie, in particular, who affects the drawl of a Southern belle and parades around in a polka-dot bra stuffed with tights.

Though the laughs are thick and furious, Tallulah is learning more than applied snogging. Cain treats his girlfriends like dirt  "Hell's teeth, he was a cad." But there's a heartrending reason for his hostility. "They're tough, those lads," one character says. "Since their Mam left." While the girls prepare for the play and brush up their kissing techniques on the backs of each other's calves, the devilish Cain begins to seem human and sympathetic.

You don't have to have read the last book to love this one. Girls will relish the breakneck plot, inventive language and knockabout comedy. Rennison's writing is so lively that they probably won't even notice they're reading about teenagers who never have actual sex or use genuine rude words.

 Kate Saunders's The Whizz Pop Chocolate Shop is published by Marion Lloyd.