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Dr. Briana Ortiz is not having the best year. Her little brother, Benny, desperately needs a new kidney. Her divorce to a cheater is about to be finalized. While the promotion she wants at the hospital was looking like a guarantee … now there’s a brand-new doctor in her ER, and her boss wants to give him some time to settle in to see if he’d like to be a candidate. And her best friend, Alexis, has fallen in love, left the city and moved to a small town two hours away.
She’s all primed to hate the new guy, Dr. Jacob Maddox, but then he writes her a letter. And it’s so good. Then she sends one back. And they do that for a while. Then they start chatting. While he seemed like a jerk, he’s really the great guy several mutual friends tell her he is.
Their casual back-and-forth, slow getting-to-know-you gets ramped up by a factor of 10 when he finds out he’s actually a match for Benny and can donate a kidney to him. And Jacob asks Briana if she can pretend to be dating him so his family doesn’t feel sorry for him because his ex is about to marry his brother. Their fake-dating, of course, does what fake dating does.
It should all be great, since they seem like they could be a happy, cute couple, but Briana in particular has a lot of walls up, a lot of baggage. Jacob has a few hurdles, too.
Since Yours Truly is a rom-com that clearly is going to have a HEA, I won’t be spoiling it to say it ends satisfactorily. It’s another sweet story from Abby Jimenez, who balances meet-cutes, tropes, characters you can’t help but root for, and great chemistry with some real challenges in her characters’ lives. Mental health issues, poor treatment by family or exes, various other difficulties are all part of their stories, and Jimenez handles them with sensitivity and grace. She doesn’t skip over them in a few pages or make characters heal unusually quickly; she gives them time and brings them through as better, happier people. It’s sweet to see.
Yours Truly isn’t my favorite of the Part of Your World books (I think it’s probably my least favorite of the three, actually), but that’s not a big concern because they’re all good. (But check out Just for the Summer: that has a lot of adorable, laugh-out-loud moments and Jimenez’s gentle touch for characters who have been through trauma).
Rated: High. Profanity includes 48 uses of strong language, around 40 instances of moderate profanity, about 50 uses of mild language, and 40 instances of the name of Deity in vain. Sexual content is high, with one detailed open-door sex scene and a lot of references to sex.
