In Phoebe Fox’s The Breakup Doctor, Brook Ogden is a licensed mental health counselor who specializes in relationships: how to improve them and how to give them up gracefully. Her expertise – and sanity – are called into question when her own relationship falls apart, leaving her friends and family to wonder, who counsels the counselor?
This is a good read with one big problem: repetition. There’s a lot of rehashing of decisions, particularly during scenes where Brook is doing something iffy. Every few paragraphs, she stops to reconsider, “should I be doing this? what if I get caught?” While that sort of second (and third, and fourth…) guessing may be true to life, in fiction it makes things drag. I think a good editor could cut 5-10% out of this book and make it a lot snappier.