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To Sir Phillip, With Love (Bridgertons, #5)

Julia Quinn

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Bridgertons

Can I read The Viscount if I've watched Bridgerton but not read The Duke & I?
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Jul 03, 2011 Melissa rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011-reads

This was a harder book for me to read than the previous books in The Bridgerton series. It was still a wonderful book to read, but the situation made me much more uncomfortable. I kept thinking about how I would feel if my own daughters got themselves into this situation, and it affected my feelings while reading this book. Eloise is one of the strong daughters of the Bridgerton family. She has reached the age of twenty-eight without being married, so in the eyes of the society she is a spinster This was a harder book for me to read than the previous books in The Bridgerton series. It was still a wonderful book to read, but the situation made me much more uncomfortable. I kept thinking about how I would feel if my own daughters got themselves into this situation, and it affected my feelings while reading this book. Eloise is one of the strong daughters of the Bridgerton family. She has reached the age of twenty-eight without being married, so in the eyes of the society she is a spinster. She has never had any issue with this. She is not married, not for a lack of opportunity. She has had several offers of marriage, but she has turned all of them down because she didn't feel as if the men offering were right for her. She was waiting for a man who could give her the kind of happily ever after relationship that her siblings have formed in the previous books. But that is what makes her action at the beginning of the novel so strange. She has been carrying on a correspondence with Sir Phillip Crane for over a year. His wife, a cousin of Eloise's, died tragically, and Eloise wrote to express her condolences. The correspondence continued for many months until Sir Phillip invited Eloise to his estate to see if they were suited for marriage. So, at the marriage of Colin and Penelope, Eloise takes off in the middle of the night. I find all of this so strange because Eloise has turned down so many men because she didn't really have a perfect love for them, yet she takes off to perhaps get hitched to a total stranger. This is somewhat explained by Eloise to be because she felt alone and thrown off balance by the marriage of her friend and fellow spinster, Penelope, to Colin. Also she had turned Sir Phillip into a much greater man in her head than he ended up being when she first encountered him.

This is what was so difficult for me to read -- Eloise finds herself with Sir Phillip, and he ends up having quite a few issues to overcome relating to his first marriage, the rearing of his children, and the horrible abuse he suffered from his father. He is not the conversationalist that Eloise is, and he avoids so many situations when he feels uncomfortable. It is obvious that they are not in a healthy relationship at all. I kept thinking about how I would feel if my daughters hastily planned a marriage to a man they met through the internet, and then had they continued to push into this relationship when the man ended up being distant and cold in many ways. It would be hard to see. But unlike our world, this is England of the 19th century, and Eloise has committed a major social faux pas by running off to spend the fortnight at Sir Phillip's without a chaperone. Eloise's brothers arrive on the scene, and a marriage is demanded. And so it happens. Eloise finds herself in a marriage with a man that may or may not be good. She believes him to be good, but she does not find that she enjoys feeling alone when he abandons her often during the days. I just kept feeling as if I wanted her to find some way to escape this terrible relationship, even though the third person narration let me see Sir Phillip's inner thoughts to know that he wasn't as bad as his outer actions would lead me to believe. Although I knew that everything was going to turn out okay (after all, this is a Julia Quinn romance!), I wasn't pulling for the relationship like I was in previous books. I had to keep talking myself into hoping that they would find love.

In the end, all was well. But, I have to admit that it is highly unlikely that in a real world situation a couple who enters a marriage having only spent less than a week together before, and then only a week together after, could actually get through all of their deep issues in that amount of time. I do think that marriages that begin in such a hasty way do have a chance to improve, and those in the marriage can find that they can form a deep love for one another, but in reality that cannot take place in only a week. But, I don't read these books because I need to hear reality. I read them for the dream of happily ever after. I love that the couples in these books find true love and happiness with someone who can help them to overcome whatever issues they may be facing. I was happy that Eloise was able to find true love with Phillip and that Phillip and his children were able to find the true happiness that they were unable to enjoy with his first wife. This was not my favorite Bridgerton book, but it was still a great one to read. I enjoyed it a lot, and it was a quick, fun summer read!

2018 Audio Update - This book has probably my least favorite hero of the Bridgerton series ... a pity since Eloise seemed to deserve someone a bit more exciting. Still, while it doesn't rate as high as the previous Bridgerton books, it is still a great story. This time I listened to the audio book, and I think that the audio book experience was actually better than the experience I had when I read the book originally ... maybe because I wasn't given much time to reflect on some of the things that I didn't like about Sir Phillip when I read the book. Four stars for this installment in the Bridgerton universe. I love this family! ...more

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