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. The Esme subplot was similarly irritating. By the end of the novel, Henrietta's major selling point as a heroine is her endless self-sacrifice for babies. I know that romance novels are frequently unrealistic, but that made me feel queasy. 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.

This, too, steers the novel in the direction of obnoxious moralizing. Henrietta's devotion to the children overwhelms the romance. 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. She became in the blink of an eye a truly despicable, moralizing faux-sophisticate. 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. Henrietta starts off charming but turns into a shrewish stick in the mud. He looks like Johnny Depp and he likes lace and that's pretty much all that James has to say about him. She's lost me for good with Fool for Love. It's the third Eloisa James I've read, and it is also without doubt the last. There's so much wrong with this book that I don't know where to start. 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. 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. 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.

It is made very clear to the reader that he cares more about his clothes and appearance than about his sisters. He is described by various other characters as a popinjay, a dandy, a fop, etc. I find the hero to be completely unlikeable.

This is the most disappointing novel I've ever read by Eloisa James, and I've been a fan of hers for quite some time.

Fool for Love by Eloisa James