To Sir Phillip, With Love (Bridgertons #5), by Julia Quinn
To Sir Phillip, With Love by Julia Quinn
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
When the “Happily Ever After” Feels Like a Moral Hangover
This one was supposed to clear the air. Well, it succeeded in making it smell worse. Every single character, and every major aspect of this novel, left me with an uneasy feeling.
Eloise Bridgerton is confused, snobby, garrulous, and somehow deeply ambiguous. She runs away from what exactly? Nobody forces her into marriage but herself. After a year of merely exchanging letters, she decides to marry a stranger and be a good, obedient wife. And yet, she also strains toward what might, at the time, have passed for an “independent spinster”.
Phillip, meanwhile, basks in his self-sacrificing suffering-husband and widower roles while being emotionally estranged from his two eight-year-old children.
The children are neglected, abused, and basically thoroughly traumatised, which Eloise unconvincingly tries to “love away”.
Their mother, Phillip’s late wife, looms over the entire estate like a dark cloud. She’s depicted as wilfully suffering, even though it ultimately becomes clear that she suffered from severe, untreated depression. Nevertheless, for large parts of this novel, she’s the semi-present villain.
So much feels awkward and ethically problematic in this novel, I didn’t come to enjoy it at all. Sometimes one can marginalise such issues by referring to “story of its time” or “guilty pleasure” but this was neither. This was just an unpleasant waste of time.
One star out of five.
