Fool for Love
Written by Eloisa James
Narrated by Justine Eyre
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
The Woman
Lady Henrietta Maclellan longs for the romantic swirl of a London season. But as a rusticating country maiden, she has always kept her sensuous nature firmly under wraps -- until she meets Simon Darby. Simon makes her want to whisper promises late at night, exchange kisses on a balcony, receive illicit love notes. So Henrietta lets her imagination soar and writes...
The Letter
A very steamy love letter that becomes shockingly public. Everyone supposes that he has written it to her, but the truth hardly matters in the face of the scandal to come if they don't marry at once. But nothing has quite prepared Henrietta for the pure sensuality of...
The Man
Simon has vowed he will never turn himself into a fool over a woman. So, while debutantes swoon as he disdainfully strides past the lovely ladies of the ton, he ignores them all...until Henrietta. Could it be possible that he has been the foolish one all along?
Eloisa James
Eloisa James is a USA Today and New York Times bestselling author and professor of English literature, who lives with her family in New York, but can sometimes be found in Paris or Italy. She is the mother of two and, in a particularly delicious irony for a romance writer, is married to a genuine Italian knight.
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Duchess in Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fool for Love Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Wild Pursuit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Your Wicked Ways Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
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Reviews for Fool for Love
161 ratings9 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Estes story keeps intruding on Henrietta s story. It would of been better if each lady got her own book. Way too much switching back and forth.
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5This is the most disappointing novel I've ever read by Eloisa James, and I've been a fan of hers for quite some time. I find the hero to be completely unlikeable. He is described by various other characters as a popinjay, a dandy, a fop, etc. It is made very clear to the reader that he cares more about his clothes and appearance than about his sisters. He has a lifelong friendship that he supposedly holds dear, yet the two men talk of nothing that matters and neither knows each other well enough to judge the other.
The parts I found most distasteful were when the hero tries to discourage his young sister from hugging him because she would ruin his clothes, despite the young child being desperately unhappy and with no one to show her even the slightest kindness, and later in the book when he commends his young sister from stopping short of hugging him - she has learned not to touch his clothing and make him dirty. Um, yeah, not my kind of man. You can keep him, Eloisa.
I would not recommend this book to anyone, except perhaps as an exercise in rewriting it to make the hero a much better man than he is. Ugh. So disappointed. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I didn't get to know the hero, maybe because there isn't much from his point of view, but still liked the story a lot. Again, I was equally interested in Esme and Sebastian.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5I found this overly weighted down by very contrived drama, which is not my thing at all. Eloisa James can write well, but sometimes reason seems to fall by the wayside. A man wants to marry a woman but is deterred when told he won't be able to bed her because any risk of pregnancy would sign her death warrant- fine. He's a man of the world but doesn't consider just using birth control- fine. But then when the woman is told of it, rather than go to the man like, 'hey, that hurdle could be surmountable after all, let's weigh in this new information and maybe marry after all!'. Somehow she and his aunt contrive this whole plot that is bound to sully both of their reputations, and cast shame on their families, all in an effort to *trap him into marriage*, ('cause everyone likes that, right? A great way to start off a lifelong relationship!?) all still without giving him the new information, and even though *he had already wanted to marry her of his own volition!* ... What the Hell?! That is just insane. Sometimes the heroine seemed like a steady sort, and then she would fly into being totally irrational, and somehow men found her utterly charming when she was rude? I don't know. It was just too much. There were some nice aspects too, but they were overwhelmed by the problems for me.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I gave this book 3 stars, it would have gotten an extra star had I not had to read so much about Esme. I didn't like her character in the first book, and I found that her story took away from Henrietta and Simon's. I was enjoying their chemistry and looking forward to the next chapter but it would be interrupted by a chapter about Esme. Perhaps my dislike of her is just me, perhaps others will enjoy her and the story will move along great. But unfortunately for me she just made the story drag along. I will give this author one more chance... but not from this series as I have a feeling Esme will pop up again...
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5There's so much wrong with this book that I don't know where to start. It's the third Eloisa James I've read, and it is also without doubt the last. She's lost me for good with Fool for Love.
- Darby is a thinly drawn hero. He looks like Johnny Depp and he likes lace and that's pretty much all that James has to say about him.
- Henrietta starts off charming but turns into a shrewish stick in the mud. Early in the book she's very understanding and mature, but once she gets it into her head that it's time to start impressing Simon's friends, or London in general, everything she says is catty catty catty. She became in the blink of an eye a truly despicable, moralizing faux-sophisticate. Especially all of the insulting comments she directs towards Darby's best friend, which James tries to pass off as "wit" but are anything but.
- Henrietta's devotion to the children overwhelms the romance. This, too, steers the novel in the direction of obnoxious moralizing. I should have guessed what was going on when Darby sees Henrietta covered in VOMIT and thinks about how the sticky liquid molds her dress to her figure and is really turned on. I know that romance novels are frequently unrealistic, but that made me feel queasy. By the end of the novel, Henrietta's major selling point as a heroine is her endless self-sacrifice for babies.
- The Esme subplot was similarly irritating. Esme is pregnant, she feels fat and ugly, and so the knight in shining armor rides in on his white horse...in order to assure her that pregnancy hasn't made her ugly and go gaga over the miracle of life.
I know that there is a whole sub-genre of Romance that is about men who just can't get enough of domestic pleasures, pie-baking and cozy nights by the fire and apparently vomit and pregnant women. However, that sub-genre is not Regency and I was really unhappy to find it sneaking in here.
I've come to the conclusion that James' schtick is to take these supposedly "free" or "scandalous" women and recoup them one by one into staid, rule-obeying, traditional and unremarkable mommies. She kills their fire and personality. I, for one, think it's truly awful. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Another fast, fun read in the series. There's some good character development from the first book and some of the characters seem to be heading in interesting directions.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Another cute book in the series. I enjoyed the humor in this one. Simon and Henrietta were a very cute couple.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I enjoyed this book more than I have the previous two James books that I've read. I enjoyed watching Henriette and Darby come together, finding their way through the drama inherent in her "deformity." Her becoming pregnant was a plot twist that was obvious, but it was pretty well done by James. Seeing past characters was, as always, interesting, as was seeing Josie as a child. The only thing that really bothered me about this was Esme and Sebastian's interactions. She's too hung up on appearances now, and it's really no fun to read. Otherwise, a solid romance novel.