Eloise Bridgerton's Book is... Season 6! (To Sir Phillip, With Love Review)

Well, I read it, and somehow it's just as bad as people said it was. Excuse me, what is your problem? Hello romance girlies, I'm Lady Genevieve, your resident James Cameron's avatar stan, who has seen Fire and Ash seven or eight times at the cinema. It might actually be more than that by the time I get around to posting this video. It's my favorite movie of all time. Yeah, me too. I'm recording this video in early January, but depending on other things, I don't know yet if I will wait to publish this until mid or late January. But I'm mentioning this because James Cameron is a romance girlie who consistently feeds the romance girlies in the audience, and I needed to remind myself that truly exceptional romantic fiction exists as I enter the supremely unromantic world that is To Sir Philip Would Love. If I weren't already neck deep in covering Netflix's Bridgerton, I might have DNF'd this. I was maybe one or two chapters in, and I was ready to tap out. Initially, I was going to try to take notes that would cover a lot of the material in detail so that I could offer up a retelling of exactly what's in here for anyone that wanted that sort of a recap thrown back at you, but I quickly realized that doing so would triple or quadruple the time it would take to finish reading the book if I were to stop and take notes every time I had some sort of a response to what was written down, the response usually being something along the lines of, what is this? What part of this is supposed to put me in a romantic mood? This man is insufferable. Book Eloise has no notable personality. This woman has no talent. Thus, I wanted to be done with this book as quickly as possible, so I opted out of taking thorough notes and completely reworked my approach so that we can discuss this a bit, but then we're going to just move on and not dwell here because I don't want to. Let me explain. I'm at the point now where I don't have an interest in doing videos lambasting every detail of what's wrong with a work of fiction. It's just not fun for me to work on. That doesn't mean that I'm never critical. There were multiple film reviews I did in 2025 of films that I rated as rotten or films where my feedback was mixed, so parts of the film I spoke favorably about and other parts I was critical. For this book, I had repeatedly seen in my comments over the years that I've covered the show that this was singled out as being the least favorite, the worst, the bottom of people's rankings of the A through H Bridgerton books, but even with all of that, I didn't assume that I was going to have as negative of an opinion about the material as others had commented. There are source material books that I've read and done videos on where I might not love what I just read, but it doesn't feel like a chore to explain what the story is. But I think some of my aversion to the material is because of what the intended genre and premise is compared to how it was executed. Broadly speaking, I would put this in a somewhat similar reaction to how it felt to read Verity by Colleen Hoover in order to do a source material video on that, because that was meant to be a thriller, but it was boring. You can't be boring when you're meant to be building tension, suspense, and mystery to your audience. I'm not used to paying attention to super boring long stuff, okay? With To Sir Philip With Love, it's meant to be a regency romance, and yet it was not romantic. It started off so poorly that it was simply never able to recover, and as a result, I found myself bored, uninspired, and not in any sort of romantic mood. When you're fundamentally failing at the broad concept of the genre itself, you're automatically going to land in the lowest tier of my scoring system. Most of you won't know this, but I am keeping my reading logs on Patreon. You've got my full 2025 reading log on there, and we've already started on the 2026 one. I changed my rating system, and this is in the lowest tier. Easily. This isn't going to be a video where I give you a detailed explanation of the plot and everything I don't like about it, because pick a page. I don't like it. That being said, similar to my experience reading Verity by Colleen Hoover, I would say that even if I don't rate the source material favorably, I'm not assuming that there's no way for me to enjoy an adaptation of that work. There are many changes that could be made that would result in an Eloise Bridgerton season that I would have a nice time watching. At the time of outlining and recording this video, we don't have official confirmation that she will be season 5, but most folks who are following the show somewhat closely are guessing that this will be the case. Also, I haven't watched any of season 4 yet, so if you are watching this video months or years from now, after season 4 is already out, and you're wondering why I didn't mention specific details of that season regarding whatever material they've given Eloise, that's why. For this video, what I wanted to do is touch on a couple of my main points regarding issues with the source material, things that would necessitate alterations in the adaptation process, either because they're naff in the book and should be changed, or because the book material doesn't really match what has been established across the show's canon for that character. I will also throw in a couple of other bits of feedback of what I think could work in the show's favor for this particular love story. In general, I think the fact that so many voices seem to rate this particular story lower on their Bridgerton A-H lists means that the show has a lot of room to change things for the better. I won't speak for any other viewers of the show, but my personal opinion is that I don't care if they keep any of Eloise's season close to the book. As long as the finished result is something that's enjoyable to watch, I'm not all that concerned about them needing to keep certain details of the source material intact. Do a love story that's fun for us to watch, that's all I'm asking for. There are a few major issues I had with the book. Book Eloise reads as very flat compared to how she is on the show when she has her moments to shine. Claudia is very funny, and I think a fair bit of that characterization is coming from Claudia's comedic abilities. It's not just about the line she's been given, Daphne, you must make haste. Yelling that line conceptually doesn't necessarily equate to humor. Her asking, how does a woman come to be with child, that line doesn't necessarily equate to humor. But those lines are funny specifically because Claudia makes them so with her line delivery. Book Eloise is not funny. If they don't let Claudia be funny when it's her turn to finally be the main Bridgerton falling in love, that would be an absolute waste of her skills and something that really sets her apart in this large family. And honestly, even if I'm not as invested in Eloise and Philip as a couple, if Eloise gets to be funny, that will automatically improve my opinion of the overall viewing experience. I'll give you an example of what I mean. The wedding planner. Do I really care about Mary and Steve becoming a couple in the end? Not really. But that's a wacky movie. It's funny. So I think of it fondly. Reading this book, there's also a disadvantage in the sense that I don't really know Philip. He has appeared on the show, but only briefly. And his personality didn't really pop in a way that would make me excited about seeing him as the leading man. But he might be fun to watch once he's given more room to perform and a variety of things to do as a character. The first thing we get from this story in the book is the death of Marina. Her backstory has similarities and differences to what we saw of the character on the show. She was originally supposed to marry Philip's older brother, but he passed away. So Philip stepped up to marry her instead. However, on the show, the twins were fathered by her now deceased betrothed, whereas in the book, Philip is the father of the twins. Biologically and in every other way. If I summarize the other bits of information we learn about Marina throughout the book, she is a distant cousin of Eloise. And Eloise remembers her in such a way that we can assume that she was already predisposed to some sort of depression or broader mental illnesses. I'm not going to diagnose her. She is a fictional character. And at best, all you can really do is guess based on context clues for the sake of making the information make sense in terms that a modern audience would understand. We might guess that she felt the loss of her betrothed, though that's not something that they give all that much attention to in the book because we're never in her direct point of view. We saw this to be the case on the show, though, for the character. In the book, we might also guess that she had a severe case of postpartum based on how Philip describes her. He has not all that understanding of this, though it would be period accurate because he wouldn't know of that term or condition. That being said, this is part of the reason why Philip is an unappealing romantic lead to read about from a 21st century perspective. The Bridgerton love stories are supposed to be a fantasy where you can get swept up in the connection between the two characters that are the central focus of that love story, whomever they might be, depending on which season or which book you're in. I do not find a male romantic lead to be appealing when he is oblivious to the postpartum plight of his wife before and after she has passed away. He's also an emotionally stunted character and unable to effectively parent his children. He's got his own traumas, which I will explain in a bit if you will allow me to get there. And a major motivating factor behind his decision to pursue a second wife is because he wants a woman to be a decent mother to his children in a way that is opposite to his deceased wife, Marina. The very notion of getting an Eloise Bridgerton season in which she might be chosen by a man who simply wants to find a mother for his children, it's repulsive and it's not the romantic fantasy that Bridgerton viewers want to be swept up in. Marina walks off one sunny day in the book and Philip follows her to the lake where she jumps in, he fishes her out, and she is not happy about being pulled out. But she catches ill from being in the lake and passes away shortly thereafter. Eloise had written to Philip to send her condolences regarding Marina. He writes back and the correspondence continues for a year until one day he proposes to her in a letter. He suggests that Eloise may come and visit him so they can meet in person for the first time. Yes, he proposed without having met her even one time. Why on earth would you pick me to be your princess? And he will call an aunt or some other female relative of his to come over and be a chaperone so that everything may be done appropriately. A couple of important details I think you should know. If you don't already because you haven't read this book. Eloise sneaks off to go to his place in the countryside without writing to him first. So when she arrives, there is no official chaperone present. It's the two of them, the twins who are eight years old and the household staff whom I suppose don't qualify as being able to act as chaperones. See, this is posh English nonsense. But anyway, our friendship is built on our mutual distrust of England. Eloise did not outright tell any of her family or friends that she would be leaving or where she was going. She did leave a note for them, but they didn't find that. It's assumed to have gotten lost in the shuffle of Bridgerton invitations, papers and whatnot. More on that in a bit. Just bear with me. Philip did not tell her in any of his letters that he has two children. So she doesn't find out about them until she arrives and there's no chaperone. And when they meet, it's so awkward. And it put me off, even though I was already put off by the marina death and their weird correspondence. By the way, the book's timeline is presented in a weird way. They rushed through them having this written correspondence. It was a year. And yet the way it was written, it felt to me like they had just met without any chemistry because there's nothing compelling about the way those letters are written, the ones that are written out for us to read. So why exactly am I supposed to root for these two? An emotionally stunted botanist who is bad at parenting his children wants to find a replacement mother for them. And he's supposed to be Eloise's happily ever after. You must be joking. Surely not. The first time they meet, he's taken aback by how much more attractive she is than he imagined her to be. He thought that a 28-year-old spinster was merely going to be a practical option. He's 30, by the way, with the emotional intelligence of an 11-year-old. And I was so put off by how catastrophic of an opening this was to their so-called love story that I was hoping and waiting for them to somehow win me over. And yet they never did. You're seriously just making it worse and I want to go home. No, you can't. Now, we have no idea yet how similar or dissimilar Eloise's season will be to the book. But one point I want to draw attention to is that if the actors have chemistry, that can already go a long way to win over myself and the numerous other viewers who are interested in seeing more romantic fiction being greenlit and done to a high standard. We have not seen Eloise and Philip interact on the show. If they can give us a few well-executed yearning looks, if she says something funny and he's charmed by that the way that we as the audience are charmed by Eloise every time she says something funny, we're probably going to like him more as a result. A man who is charmed by a funny woman? That's a good start. The way that the book was not. Are you on drugs? No, but if I were, would that be a deal breaker? And one of the few fundamental changes, but it's a fairly simple one to make if they have enough sense to do it, is don't have Philip looking for a new mother for the twins. He might have it in mind that she needs to be okay with them. They're there, after all, and part of his life. If they simply end up together because of a genuine romantic connection and the children just happen to be a part of the story, I think that will go over a lot better with the romance girlies than how it is framed in the book. To give you more context about Philip's backstory, his father was very cruel. There's a lot of corporal punishment in this book, far more than I would want to encounter in a so-called romance story. Philip's father was so extreme that when Philip was a young boy, he didn't make a jump on his horse, so he was punished by his father using the horse whip he had handy, and now there are scars on Philip's back. The topic of corporal punishment comes up so much, there's a point where Philip himself does it to his children, not with a horse whip. They don't give you a detailed explanation of what he's doing when he leaves the room with the twins, but they do explicitly confirm that he engaged in corporal punishment. If I didn't need to finish this book so that I could update you, the Bridgerton viewers who follow my running commentary on the show, on the fact that I have now read it and here are some of my general thoughts, I absolutely would have DNF'd this. Recreationally speaking, this is not the type of thing that I would read. There are books I read for source material research, and there are books I read because I want to get something meaningful or interesting out of the reading experience. This is a source material book, so I don't mind reading it because I do learn something in the process, I can have a sense of what might need to be changed, and possibly an idea of what the book readers would hope to see or not see included in the adaptation. From my point of view, the only detail that I think works in Philip's favor is the fact that he's a botanist. So if he were to use flowers as a love language, if we see a lot of flowers used in the set decoration of key scenes the two of them have together, that could be nice and romantic. Focus on the flowers, chemistry, and humor. All of that is romantic. Do you know what's not romantic? Corporal punishment. Downsize that part significantly, if not altogether. And either way, definitely don't have your main man of the season being the one to do that to his children. There is a point where he intervenes in the, I forgot her job title, but she is responsible for educating the children, and she is using a lot of corporal punishment. And then right after he got into an argument with Eloise and she ran off to go visit Benedict and Sophie because they live somewhat nearby, he walks in on the corporal punishment happening and he's so outraged by the extreme nature of it, and yet he also deploys corporal punishment on his children. Whatever, I never said that this book makes sense. But anyway, it's meant to be a big turning point for his character. And then he fires that teacher and realizes, oh yeah, Eloise was right. But anyway, I never want to talk about that again. Something happens and y'all just waiting on me to be combative. Guys, I'm not even mad, I promise. Remember how I said that Eloise didn't outright tell her family what she was doing or where she was going? Well, unbeknownst to her, they didn't find the note that she left them. So they asked Penelope to go through her room and see if they could find something to indicate where she went. One of her letters to Philip was discovered, and that's how they figure out where she is. I think it was about midway through the book when we get to this point in the story, and I was feeling bored, uninspired, unmoved, and not wooed in the slightest, as I already said. But then, do you know what happens? All of Eloise's brothers arrive at Philip's home unannounced. They come charging in, they attack him, and it was the first time that I had any reason to perk up. Finally, something was happening. And the idea of the show doing their version of this held promise. There was actual potential. The physical comedy of four grown men barreling into the house unannounced and attacking Philip, whom I was not a fan of at this or any other point in the story, seemed like it could be fun to watch. Another important detail you need to know about this encounter is that Eloise had been the victim of a nasty prank by the twins who want her to leave at this point in the story. They are won over by her eventually, but this is before then. This is before they decide that they actually really like her. They tied up a string slightly above the ground, which caused her to trip, and she more or less face planted onto the floor. She turned her head slightly, so it was her cheek that hit the ground, but the injury is such that it results in a black eye. So the Bridgerton boys run inside, they attack Philip, and then when Eloise is yelling at them to stop and they turn to get a good look at her and they see that she has a black eye, they proceed to attack him with even more aggression, which I was fine with. That was the only real popcorn moment I got from this book. However, as this part of the story carries on, the writing issues became quickly apparent. If you've seen discussions of Bridgerton books, you will have probably heard this point made, or perhaps you've noticed it yourself if you are someone that has gone through and read some or all of these books. The male leads of the Bridgerton books are often overly aggressive in a way that is archaic and unbecoming of a man that's meant to be an appealing romantic lead. It's very toxic caveman behavior. Having all four of those Bridgerton brothers in the same scene, their personalities started to overlap. Book Colin is slightly more humorous in the books when he's not in his own book, but still overall the charm of them showing up and being disruptive in the way that they were began to wear off. It could go over much better in the show though if you lean into a more comedic angle and let the actors really bounce off of one another in a way that could be fun to watch. I love a bit of Bridgerton family bickering where there's always love at the heart of those interactions, but basically because Eloise snuck off and has been staying there unchaperoned, they need to get married. They tried to play things off in the story as if it's fine because there was already something brewing between them, so they would have decided to do that themselves anyway. But the book had not convinced me of them as a romantic couple, and especially of Philip being worthy of Eloise's time. Book Eloise has had multiple other proposals over the years, but at this point she rejected all of them. And yet I'm meant to believe that this is the best option for her? This is her long awaited happily ever after? It'll be eight years since Bridgerton first premiered on Netflix that she finally gets to have her love story if we assume that she's season five and they continue to take an inexcusably long time of two years to release a new season. You had better give the show's comedy diva a fun season or else what did we wait this long for? I don't expect the show to do another forced marriage story despite how often it's repeated in these books. They do it at least what, three times? Daphne, Antony, and now Eloise, all different flavours of the same thing. Forced marriage. But on the show, they only really kept that trope for Daphne. Daphne was a fake dating slash forced marriage story, Antony was enemies to lovers, Colin was friends to lovers, and now Benedict is going to be an upstairs downstairs Cinderella story. Eloise and Philip have a correspondence of a year that felt like a couple of weeks, the way that it was poorly written in the book. And then it's only two weeks from the time that she arrives at his home before they're married and I'm supposed to believe they're in love when the book is all tell, no show, no chemistry, and nothing appealing to win me over. I wanted to give you an example of what I mean when I say this book is all tell, no show for its so-called romance. So we are going to skip ahead to chapter 13. This is after they've decided slash been forced to marry. The wedding hasn't happened yet, but it will sometime soon. Philip asks Eloise why she left home the way that she did when she first came to meet him. He had been curious about whether or not she had a lover or maybe she suffered some sort of blow to her reputation, something that would cause her to flee, and she tells him no. If you had a lover, he said quietly, it won't change my intentions. It's not that at all, she said quickly, mostly just to make him stop talking about it. It was, her voice trailed off and she sighed, it was. And then she told him everything, all about the marriage proposals she'd received and the ones Penelope hadn't and the plans they jokingly made to grow old and spinsterish together. And she told him how guilty she'd felt when Penelope and Colin had married and she couldn't stop thinking about herself and how alone she was. She told him all that and more. She told him what was in her mind and what was in her heart and she told him things she'd never told another soul. And it occurred to her that for a woman who opened her mouth every other second, there was an awful lot inside of her that she'd never shared. And then when she was done, and in truth, she didn't even realize she'd finished, she just kind of ran out of energy and dwindled off into silence. He reached out and took her hand. It's all right, he said. And it was, she realized. It actually was. You must be joking. You cannot be serious and just say that she told him what was in her mind and heart and things she'd never shared. Like what? Tell us what she said so we can feel any sort of connection deepening between them. What you just gave me, that embodies the concept of going through the motions. Do you remember in Freaky Friday when the teacher is asking a student about the play they were supposed to have read and the student doesn't know the answer? He probably didn't do the assigned reading at all. So the teacher is essentially spoon feeding him something to say. That's the same feeling I have here about what I just read, except Freaky Friday was at least considerate enough to its audience to be funny. Eloise Bridgerton on the Bridgerton series is funny. I've already said this. Despite the way they've been dimming her light since she got into that fight with Penelope over the Lady Whistledown reveal at the end of season two. Oh, and I didn't mention this, but there's no Lady Whistledown in this book. You get a few excerpts here and there of letters Eloise has written to her loved ones over the course of many years of her life. My request for Eloise's season is to just be funny, whimsical, and romantic. She's the one we're invested in. She's the one we want to see get her happily ever after. This book is preoccupied with Philip's woes, trauma, and grief. I don't know him, and I'm not tuning into Eloise's season to see him. Those of us who read Benedict's book, many of us are in fact tuning in for Sophie, but that's because Sophie is actually easy to root for and be invested in, even in the book. Regardless of her being a new character to the show, we are all on team Sophie. But Philip, as he is in the book, I don't care. I care far more for his dead wife than I do him. If you rework the character though, I may very well be charmed by him on the show, but it's a lot harder for me to imagine what that looks like because of how little we've seen of him on the show thus far. With someone like Benedict, even though he is far too much in his book, we've already seen him on the show and been charmed by his humor and his heart, so it's a lot easier to just overlook the unsavory details of his book characterization when you read or reread that book in preparation to watch season 4. Philip needs a massive personality overhaul, and so does this so-called love story. Eloise deserves to be loved for who she is, not her ability to be a good stepmother. And regardless of her experience being in a big, noisy, high-energy family, she hasn't exactly been presented thus far as being naturally maternal. On the upside though, the fact that my impression and opinion of this book is as low as it currently is, that means that they really have nowhere else to go but up for Eloise's season. It doesn't have to be my favorite love story the show has done to be an improvement on this source material. Work your magic, bring on the whimsy. This is a library book by the way, support your local library. They allow you to be nosy about source material for free. But all of that to say, this book does include an epilogue. And do you know what the epilogue is? It's a flash forward about Amanda finding her own love interest. A man whom she marries after Eloise conspired to play matchmaker. Why exactly are you asking me to care about an 8-year-old's eventual happily ever after when you couldn't even be bothered to develop Eloise properly in her love story? She's as flat as the paper she writes her letters on. But the 8-year-old gets a love story added on to this and you want me to feel something about that being a part of this book. She's 8! She's a child!