Sharon E Cathcart, $0.99, ISBN 978-1310671326
Historical Romance, 2014

Clytemnestra Preston has had her maid lock themselves in her room for long periods of time, refusing to attend the balls that she used to love. Her family is worried, and her brother’s fiancée is starting to wonder whether the loony runs in the family she is about to marry into. What is happening to Clytie?

Well, only Dr Samuel Whittington seems to have an inkling, as well as the patience, to help her. He’s from the military, and he has seen similar abrupt changes of behavior in men that had undergone traumas. What kind of trauma did Clytie experience?

Sharon E Cathcart’s Clytie’s Caller is about the heroine getting some mental healing, as opposed to sexual healing, so there are plenty of analytical conversations here, mostly initiated by Dr Whittington. I appreciate what the author is trying to do here, but to be honest, I feel that this story is way too short to contain a plot that is far more complex than its length could fit.

The story feels more like the heroine’s treatment journey than a romance, and the fact that she is a patient means that the romance is also very unbalanced—the heroine, being the patient, is in a position of weakness, so at the end of the day, she has all the hallmarks of a shrink’s patient that has fallen in love with her shrink for all the wrong reasons. These two don’t really know one another well outside of the doctor-patient thing, so I feel tad uneasy about the whole thing even by the last page.

On the bright side, there are some sweet tender moments toward the end that make me go “Aww!” a bit. I don’t normally cozy up to traditional regency-style stories, but I feel that I could have liked this one more if it had been longer and the author had explored the relationship of the two main characters more, outside of the whole shrink-patient context.

I like the idea of this story, but ultimately, the result is on the under-baked side. It’s unfortunate, as it could have been so much more.