Jimenez offers humor, spicy moments, and romance while incorporating weighty issues into her light fiction opposites-attract story Part of Your World.
In Part of Your World, Abby Jimenez takes on a meet-cute between a rural renaissance man (he's the small-town mayor, a graceful bed and breakfast host, and part of a close-knit network of community members) and a successful city doctor with expensive taste and very little practical knowledge outside of an emergency room.
Alexis and Daniel are opposites. She's coming off a bad breakup. He's ten years younger than she is. Nothing about them should fit--but they can't stay away from each other.
Everything is complicated. Alexis is part of the Montgomery legacy that built the regional hospital, and a Montgomery has been pivotal to its operation (see what I did there?) for 125 years. She can't abandon her job or her duties. And she can't bring Daniel into her world, because her parents would literally disown her and never speak to her again--which is what they've vowed to do to her brother, formerly the golden child, because of his recent marriage to someone they hadn't vetted.
Meanwhile every visit to Daniel and his town builds up Alexis, fills her heart, teaches her about unconditional love, and makes her yearn for more.
Alexis is realizing that her former significant other, Neil--who she works with, who her parents adore, who she owns a house with--has been emotionally abusing her. And that it's the same pattern she's experienced within her own family. Yet she still feels that she's stuck in her life.
She might break her own heart and Daniel's if she can't figure out how they can possibly move forward together.
Jimenez incorporates weighty issues here, such as access to health care, domestic abuse, and emotional abuse, as well as a personal reckoning in which the warring powers of privilege and responsibility are faced.
Told in alternating points of view from Daniel and Alexis, Part of Your World is romantic, often funny, sometimes sexy, poignant, and it includes touches of magical realism. I felt confident that I knew where this was going, but I was in for all of it.
I listened to this as an audiobook.
Do you have any Bossy thoughts about this book?
Abby Jimenez is also the author of Life's Too Short, The Friend Zone (The Friend Zone #1), and The Happy Ever After Playlist (The Friend Zone #2), which I included on the Greedy Reading List Six Rockin' Stories about Bands and Music.
If you like lighter fiction, you might also like the titles on the Greedy Reading List Six Lighter Fiction Stories for Great Escapism.