Clara’s Verdict
Harper Bliss has been one of the most reliable and prolific names in sapphic fiction for a number of years, and Love Me Like You Shouldn’t is precisely the kind of book that explains why her readership keeps returning with such consistency. It is a forbidden romance built on a premise that many readers will find genuinely uncomfortable — a therapist who develops feelings for, and ultimately acts on those feelings toward, a client — and Bliss has the craft and the honesty to not soften that discomfort. She writes directly into it, taking seriously the ethical transgression at the heart of the story rather than papering over it with charm, chemistry, and the convenient implication that love excuses everything. This approach makes the emotional resolution, when it comes, feel genuinely earned rather than automatically granted.
Published in March 2026 by Ladylit Publishing, narrated by Abby Craden, and running to 5 hours and 49 minutes. Rated 4.4 stars from 247 Audible UK listeners, which is a strong reception for a recently released sapphic romance that has evidently found its audience with considerable speed.
About the Audiobook
Dr Nicola Forbes is a therapist whose professional life is built on boundaries — clinical, emotional, ethical. She is also grieving her late wife and hiding behind that grief as a justification for not wanting anything from anyone, which is a different kind of self-protection than professional boundaries but serves the same purpose. When Avery Hall, a rising Hollywood actor navigating both the particular pressures of queer celebrity and a personal crisis that has brought her to therapy, walks into Nic’s practice, the attraction that Nic feels is immediate and appalling to her precisely because she knows with complete professional clarity what it costs.
Bliss constructs the tension between desire and duty with the care of a writer who understands that the most interesting ethical dilemmas are not the ones where the right answer is obvious from the beginning. Avery is bold, emotionally intelligent, and not naively infatuated — she is genuinely invested in a connection that she also understands is structurally wrong. Nic is not presented as a villain for eventually crossing the line; she is a human being who has been professionally trained to hold boundaries and is failing, catastrophically and with full awareness of what she is doing, to hold this one. The novel’s honesty about the professional and personal consequences of that failure — the career risk, the ethical violation, the question of what it means for Avery’s own healing — is one of its distinguishing qualities. The celebrity context adds a dimension of public exposure and power asymmetry that enriches the ethical texture without turning the book into a morality play about professional conduct.
The Narration
Abby Craden is one of the most consistently reliable narrators working in women’s fiction and romance, and her performance here does justice to the emotional complexity Bliss has written. The challenge with a story told primarily through internal conflict and restrained dialogue is keeping the listener genuinely inside a character’s head without losing the forward momentum of the plot — Craden navigates this with the kind of tonal intelligence that makes you trust her judgment about when to accelerate and when to let something breathe. Her voicing of Nic’s professional register versus her private emotional reality is particularly effective: you hear the controlled distance Nic maintains in the therapy room and the way that distance collapses when she is alone with her thoughts about Avery. At just under six hours, the performance sustains its quality throughout.
What Readers Say
The Audible UK response has been enthusiastic and notably thoughtful for a romance title. One reviewer who had initially considered avoiding the book entirely due to strong personal feelings about the ethics of therapist-client relationships ultimately found it a fairly lighthearted look at the internal struggles facing two women fighting to choose prudence over passion — a testament to Bliss’s skill at making you invest in characters doing things you would not sanction in real life. Another described it as Harper Bliss at her scorching nuanced best, praising specifically the willingness to engage with the ethical questions the premise raises rather than sidestepping them. A third noted that they devoured it in a single sitting and finished wanting more. The reviewers who praised most eloquently tended to be those who went in with reservations and were won over in spite of them.
Who Should Listen?
This is for readers of sapphic romance who want emotional intelligence alongside the romantic tension — who appreciate fiction that puts you in a position of genuine uncertainty about what the right thing to do is before showing you what the characters choose to do instead. Harper Bliss fans need no persuasion. Readers new to her work who enjoy forbidden romance with real ethical weight rather than the merely titillating variety will find this an excellent introduction. Those who find the structural transgression of the therapist-client dynamic impossible to engage with fictionally should respect that response — it is entirely reasonable — and look elsewhere. Listen on Audible UK
