My Week in Book Review: The Friend Zone

The Friend Zone by Abby Jimenez

Kristen Peterson doesn't do drama, will fight to the death for her friends, and has no room in her life for guys who just don't get her. She's also keeping a big secret: facing a medically necessary procedure that will make it impossible for her to have children.

Planning her best friend's wedding is bittersweet for Kristen—especially when she meets the best man, Josh Copeland. He's funny, sexy, never offended by her mile-wide streak of sarcasm, and always one chicken enchilada ahead of her hangry. Even her dog, Stuntman Mike, adores him. The only catch: Josh wants a big family someday. Kristen knows he'd be better off with someone else, but as their attraction grows, it's harder and harder to keep him at arm's length.

The Friend Zone will have you laughing one moment and grabbing for tissues the next as it tackles the realities of infertility and loss with wit, heart, and a lot of sass.

I had mixed feelings about this book. It's an adult rom-com with tons of sass and some very enjoyable characters, which is great. I like that it's a friends-to-lovers story—I have a thing for those, and my current writing project has that trope, so yeah, very fun to read one. One downer for me was that it’s definitely on the adult side when it comes to sex—this is actually the first book I’ve read where the sex was on the page and not vague in any way, shape, or form. I decided I wasn’t comfortable with that and ended up skipping over the sex—just my preference—but if you like your books steamy, this fits the bill.

I liked both the main characters, Kristen and Josh, quite a bit. Their mutual friends, Sloan and Brandon, were enjoyable too. Kristen is a “unicorn”—a woman who’s beautiful and fun without being crazy, and Josh is the perfect man (sexy firefighter, good cook, kind, dog magnet) while somehow not coming across as flat. The banter was sharp and enjoyable, and there were great funny tidbits. Like the fact that Kristen runs a business that builds little sets of dog stairs for rich people’s tiny dogs. Niiiiice. Or that she purposely dresses sloppy, complete with curlers and food stains on her shirts, when around Josh because she feels guilty that she’s attracted to him when she has a boyfriend (who’s overseas in the military). Haha!

I have two primary hangups with this book. The first is the language: there are f-bombs every few pages. The book is drenched in them. I have issues with this on a writing basis—when you use a word that much, I think it becomes filler and evidence of a poor vocabulary—but it also means I won’t recommend this book to virtually any of my personal friends (read it, random internet readers who don’t mind profanity!) because I know they won’t like that aspect. To be honest, I’ll probably never read it again just based on that.

My other issue is that I think it’s too long, and it’s all Kristen’s fault. The woman holds on to her issues way longer than she needs to, and after a certain point, I was thinking, “Come on! If you would stop keeping secrets and being so freaking stubborn, your relationship problems would resolve themselves.” Once I started thinking that (maybe around halfway), I didn’t stop thinking it until right before the very end, when she finally does get past her issues and gets with Josh (come on, I didn’t spoil anything—you knew this was a romance). So I didn't love that there was some drag to the book. But that being said, I enjoyed the twists to the story and the fact that it dealt with some real issues and had real stakes. It’s nice when everything isn’t tied up in a neat little bow. The characters go through hard stuff with them and with other people, and it brings them together in the end.

Overall, fairly enjoyable book, recommend it if you don’t mind or are willing to skim f-bombs and two very descriptive sex scenes, but otherwise, probably skip it. The author’s got another book following other characters in this world, and I’m tentatively curious . . . unsure based on the issues I had with this book . . . we’ll see how long the Overdrive waitlist is.