Customer Reviews

Doctor, Doctor (Harlequin Superromance No. 969)

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After growing up as an Army brat relocating every couple of years, veterinarian Dr. Elijah Drycinski swore as an adult he will settle in one town and not move. When his dad the Colonel retired and settled in Pine River, Wisconsin, Elijah knew he found his home. While talking to a squirrel, the shy Elijah meets Gwen Bartelt for the first time. Though still a child, he knew he found his beloved. Now years later, still secretly in love with Gwen, she is engaged to someone else. Gwen leaves town and breaks Eli's heart.

When Gwen's dad, the town doctor, injures himself, he asks Eli to call her to tell her to return home because he and his patients need her. However, the obstinate Gwen comes home for one month with three hard rules on life: "no kids, no pets, no everlasting love". The shy Eli must convince her that life with him and his dogs means kids and eternal love and a much greater existence than her solo act, but will she heed his plea or break his heart again?

DOCTOR, DOCTOR is a harmonious contemporary romance that readers will take pleasure from because of the male hunk's growing desperation to prove to his beloved that their love is worth everything. Fans will want Eli for their own because he realizes that his love may be unrequited yet goes for the gold so he can at least know he tried (at least the second time around). Lori Handeland provides a captivating story that entices the sub-genre audience to seek out her previous novels.

Harriet Klausner

The hero is a good guy, the heroine has problems (and so does her father, in spades), the "other man" is no emotional prize but does a very decent thing at the end. From a purely romance perspective, the book is a satisfying read. The main problem is timing in the backstory. The heroine, a physician, has been "away" for years, whereas the hero, a veterinarian, has been "home" in the small town where they grew up. This seems to leave out of consideration that the education needed to produce a veterinarian is just as long and strenuous as that needed to produce a physician, so that - logically - he must have been away himself a minimum of seven or eight years before returning home to open his practice and can't have been back for more than six years (given the ages assigned to them), no matter how a reader tries to stretch it.