I remember hearing good things about this book from somewhere, but it was some years back and I can’t remember where I heard them from! I remembered the title because I searched for it at the time and discovered that becoming the Doctor’s Wife was the pinnacle of achievement in the Mills & Boon universe. I’m guessing it was also before a Doctor Who episode of the same name was made, which was 2011. With so many Doctor’s Wives out there perhaps this wasn’t the one I remember hearing good things about!

My experience with Mills & Boon romances is minimal, and I’ve no intention of trashing them, but I don’t think this is quite their style. At home in Belfast Sheila is the Doctor’s Wife and mother of a teenage boy, she goes on holiday to France where the Doctor is to join her later and while she’s waiting there for him she has an affair with a younger man. You find out at the beginning that the younger man, an American, has returned to his home country without her and spend the rest of the book figuring out how they got together and how they split up. There is definitely romance here, even some reasonable sex scenes (as well as nasty ones). There’s also lots of handwringing from Sheila’s family back home who mostly think she’s lost her mind.

On the whole it was a enjoyable read, I liked the way it pretty much told you what happened first and then filled in the details. I thought, at the end of the book, it would have been better left back at the point we started at rather than carrying on afterwards. Ironically finding out what happened next made it feel more unfinished than if it had stopped earlier. A lot of the characters felt a bit cardboard cutout too. Sheila herself and her brother were well written, a lot of the rest of the cast much less so: the doctor seemed a stereotype and I felt we never found out enough about the young American to figure out why he was so attracted to Sheila.

An author I’ll be happy to try again anyway.