Mahi Mistry, $0.99, ISBN 978-93-5526-357-5
Contemporary Romance, 2022
Mahi Mistry knows how to throw me off-kilter in the first page of Twisted Therapist.
Rain kept pattering around the porch, wetting the freshly cut grass. The scent of wet earth and grass gave me comfort as I stood outside my brother’s house in San Diego. He had told me he would be here, hopefully with Zara, his fiancée, my best friend and Princess of Azmia, who was very pregnant. They were getting married in a couple of months in Azmia, and wanted to visit and meet their friends and family.
Wait, what? This is the first entry in the author’s Dominating Desires series, and nowhere in the official synopsis mentions royalty. So, imagine my surprise when that part hits me in the face in such an abrupt, sudden manner.
While this is the first entry in this series, is it linked to some other story where the princess-pregnant-party took place? Azmia sounds Arabic, so if that fellow knocked up a princess of a Muslim country out of wedlock, how come his head is still attached to his neck? Why is the author distracting me from her own story like this?
The “I” is our college student heroine, Ivy Knight. Because this is marketed as a new adult romance as well as an adult contemporary romance—I don’t think there is any difference between those two these days—the hero needs to use a nickname for the heroine as evidence of him absolutely dominating her to the point of him crafting a new identity for her, so in this case, her nickname is the most unfortunate Petal.
He is Aiden Stone, the best friend of her princess-impregnator brother. He shows up to stay at their place until he gets his own place, which is convenient as our heroine needs a rebound ravishment after finding her boyfriend and her best friend doing an assignment of the wrong kind.
By the way, is it just me or these characters have names that sound like a first-time tabletop RPG player’s first character?
Anyway, the title of this story is such because Aiden is a therapist setting up his practice in town. Ivy calls him Dr Aiden, which immediately sets my spider senses tingling because having a doctor in front of his name means that Aiden is a psychiatrist, which is not exactly the same thing as a regular therapist. Ah, it doesn’t matter in the end, because whatever Aiden is, him having a couch for Ivy to lie on is just an excuse for him to lay on her.
Yes, Aiden sleeps with one of his first clients in town, and somehow this is a good thing, applauded by their friends and family members. Is no one concerned about the power imbalance in such a relationship? It gets even more bizarre when Aiden’s conflict about shagging Ivy stems from their age difference (11 years) and her being his friend’s sister, rather than the ethical repercussions of such a boinking as well as the possible regression it can do on any progress he has with Ivy in their sessions.
Even if I can look past that, wow, this story is a rough one to read.
The author has this style that causes every sentence and even paragraph to feel disjointed from one another, as if the author were way too into her story that she ended up moving way too fast and didn’t realize that she wasn’t letting her readers catch up with her. Like that earlier sudden mention of royalty, the author would introduce issues and developments that may feel organic and natural to her, but on paper these things appear out of the blue to knock me off-kilter and leave me scratching my head in befuddlement.
The romance doesn’t feel like one either. As it is when someone falls for their shrink, Aiden appears more like Ivy’s emotional tampon as she just unloads all her rather predictable baggage on him. Then again, he gets to do a different kind of unloading on her, so I guess that makes them even? Still, the romance doesn’t seem healthy and functional because of this.
At any rate, the cover is pretty nice to look at, but the story is a tough one to get into due to the author’s technique and her approach to the romance. It sure is twisted, but not for the right seasons!
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