The Friend Zone by Abby Jimenez

This book was a bit of a mess. Let’s unpack it.

The main characters are Kristen (owner of a small business making accessories for dogs) and Josh (firefighter that also goes on medical calls, this is not a thing where I live, but I’m guessing it is in the USA) who met in a very cringey first chapter.

Turns out Josh is a colleague of Kristen’s friend Brandon, so they meet up socially almost immediately after and Kristen offers him a side gig building dog stairs for her. Basically, things went from nothing to working together (or working from Kristen’s garage) in less than a day.

They are obviously attracted to each but Kristen firmly friend zones Josh as she’s in a long-distance relationship with a deployed marine. Kristen goes out of her way to look what’s described as ‘homeless chic’ attempting to look less attractive.

The writing is not as good as Jimenez’s other series, or, so it seems to me. I’m not sure of the publication order of each novel, but this one is definitely less developed or thought through.

Here are the issues I’m seeing with this story:

• one character is in a relationship yet allows the other to sleep over in the guest room being afraid from vandals visiting her backyard at night
• undisclosed medical condition
• severe lack of open communication
• death of a side character to move the plot forward and partially resolve a conflict
• infertility that is miraculously resolved, no viable explanation provided
• cringe language (female says she want’s to make the male’s body part her screensaver being one example)
• very alpha protective male, pulling a gun out and everything to protect his beloved.

So, there’s a lot included in a relatively short novel and not all handled very well. While I did go into this with expectations of reading a romance, I didn’t expect quite so many things to be thrown into the mix.

A somewhat redeeming moment is Kristen’s friendship with Sloan, but wasn’t enough to raise my rating.

After this reading experience, I’m not sure if I want to read any more Abby Jimenez. If you’ve read any of her other books, let me know if things get better.

Happy reading.