The Breakup Doctor by Phoebe Fox

Narrated by Joelle A. Jacob

As I was perusing the new releases at Audible, the cover of The Breakup Doctor caught my eye – it’s pure Chick Lit, promising wit and whimsy in a cute, contemporary romance. So I took the plunge.

Brook Ogden is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor, in practice with a 2 psychiatrists, who has an unfortunate twist or two in her life. First, a wrecking ball at her office shuts down her career; then her boyfriend of several months – who had recently invited her to move in – decides he’s not ready for commitment. Although her best friend Sasha insists Brook is a breakup guru, having saved Sasha’s disastrous relationships many times, now Brook is having to deal with breakup on her own terms, and she’s not coping well. She manages to leverage her skills into a writing gig and a radio show, taking on short term patients who just need a little help getting past a bad relationship, while she remodels her home so that she can start her practice again.

Brook goes through all the normal and some of the really-not-normal steps of getting over the boyfriend, including a couple of first dates and a not-quite-one-night-stand. It isn’t helping that her mother has decided to leave her dad and start a career in theater. Everything around her is falling apart, including her house.

There are plenty of witty (seeming) moments and some quirky banter – mostly between Brook and her BFF, just as one would expect in true Chick Lit, along with a few disastrous episodes that were humorous, in a way. But mostly Brook came across as pretty much self-involved but not very self-aware – several months before the story starts, she was rejected mid-wedding-preparations by her fiancé, who is not the boyfriend at the beginning. It’s clear from the story that “physician, heal thyself” applies here.

All the elements were there for Chick Lit – young career woman, figuring out her life as it doesn’t go quite according to plan, with more emphasis on all relationships than on romance, told with humor and the obligatory prat falls. And the blurb led me to believe there would be a romance – but after reading the blurbs for books 2 and 3, it’s not a spoiler to say there is no HEA or even HFN in this book. If you need this in your romances, like I do, this isn’t going to get there for you. (Amazon filed it correctly under Women’s Fiction; Audible has it listed in Romance.)

Narrator Joelle A. Jacob is new to me. She came in a little under mid-range in narrating talent, in my opinion. Her pacing was off from time to time, and there were some pronunciation issues that jarred me out of the story (easy to do, since I never quite got involved with Brook and her problems anyway). For starters, she pronounced Brook’s last name with a long O – OH-gden. I guess that’s one way of saying it, one that I have never heard before. And she has this odd habit of using a glottal stop for the letter “T” inside of words, instead of using the tongue. I found it very disconcerting – I was hoping to use Audible’s new Clips feature to demonstrate this, but it isn’t working on my iPhone! Words like “gotten”, “important”, “bitten” – all sounded so odd that I sometimes stopped the audio and tried to replicate it myself. She differentiated between characters well enough for me to follow along, but the combination of pacing and pronunciation brought the entire story down.

All in all, this was an amusing escape but I won’t be following Brook’s story into books 2 and 3.

Melinda

Narration: C

Book Content: C+

Steam Factor: You can play it out loud

Violence Rating: None

Genre: Women's Fiction - Chick Lit

Publisher: Tantor Audio

The Breakup Doctor was provided to AudioGals by Tantor Audio for a review.