Part of Your World

A Perfect Weekend with an Imperfect Future

Alexis Montgomery is an ER doctor from a wealthy Chicago family who gets stuck overnight in Wakan, Minnesota — population 9,000 — when her car breaks down. She ends up at a bar, meets Daniel Grant, and has the kind of connection she’s spent years too busy to find.

What could have been a one-night story turns into a weekend, and the weekend turns into something neither of them planned for.

Abby Jimenez’s Part of Your World is a romance about two people who are genuinely right for each other discovering that being right for each other is not sufficient to solve the logistical problem of their lives.

Daniel Grant

The hero of the novel is one of Jimenez’s most effective creations. Daniel is a handyman who owns his own business in a town he loves, surrounded by a community that matters to him, entirely at peace with a life that would look modest from the outside. He is not a hero in disguise — not secretly rich, not professionally frustrated, not waiting for rescue from his circumstances.

This is more unusual in romance than it should be. Daniel’s contentment is specifically characterized, and his willingness to be entirely himself with Alexis from the beginning gives the romance a groundedness that slow-building pretense would undermine.

The Class Dynamic

Jimenez is more interested in what class difference actually means in practice than most romance authors. It’s not just that Alexis earns more — it’s that her world runs on ambition, status, parental expectation, and geographic mobility in ways that Daniel’s doesn’t. The incompatibility is real and the book doesn’t pretend otherwise.

The question is not whether they like each other — they obviously do — but whether the structures of their lives can be rearranged around what they feel. This makes the conflict more interesting than many romance novels manage.

Wakan as Character

The small town of Wakan is drawn with genuine affection. Jimenez resists the temptation to make it either a paradise unspoiled by city people or a backward place in need of Alexis’s modernizing influence. It’s just a specific place with specific people who have reasons to love it.

The community functions as a kind of test for Alexis: can she see what Daniel sees in it? Her gradual opening to the town parallels her gradual opening to what a relationship with Daniel could mean.

The Contemporary Fairy Tale Structure

The novel’s subtitle and cultural framing position Part of Your World in deliberate conversation with the fairy tale tradition — specifically the fish-out-of-water story in which a character from one world discovers a life in another world that turns out to suit them better. Alexis is the character who has been living in the wrong world: a life organized around her family’s expectations and her professional ambitions in a city that requires constant performance, and a weekend in a small town that offers, for the first time in recent memory, the experience of being entirely at ease.

Jimenez uses this structure with more nuance than a straightforward fairy tale inversion would allow. She does not suggest that Alexis’s city life is wrong and Daniel’s small-town life is right — the novel is more interested in what they are each willing to give up and rearrange than in which world is better. The fairy tale parallel is present but ironic: unlike the Disney heroine, Alexis cannot simply choose a different world. The structures of her professional and family life have real claims on her.

Daniel as a Departure from Romance Conventions

The romance hero who is entirely comfortable with who he is, without hidden depths that explain his contentment as compensation for loss, is rarer in the genre than it should be. Daniel Grant is genuinely happy in Wakan: he has built a business he is proud of, a community he belongs to, a life that fits him. He is not waiting to be rescued from it. He is not secretly ambitious in ways his circumstances don’t allow.

This creates an unusual dynamic with Alexis, whose ambition and mobility have been organized around the assumption that men who are comfortable in small places are men with limited horizons. Daniel has no limited horizons — he has chosen horizons, which is different. His willingness to let Alexis see this without defending it or explaining it is one of the novel’s most appealing character choices.

The Class Question

Jimenez engages with class difference more honestly than most contemporary romance, which tends either to make class irrelevant or to use it as a source of misunderstanding that dissolves with good faith. In Part of Your World, the class difference is real and structural: Alexis’s family has money, expectations, and a particular relationship to social status that is not simply a set of values she could abandon. Daniel’s comfort in his life is in part the comfort of someone who is not subject to those pressures, which makes him alien to Alexis in ways that are not just cultural but psychological.

The novel explores what it actually costs to bridge a class gap: not just which dinners to attend or which family members to manage, but the more fundamental question of whether two people shaped by different economic conditions can build a shared understanding of what a life should look like. Jimenez does not simplify this, and the novel’s ending is honest about what both characters have had to accept.

Wakan and Community

The small town of Wakan functions as a community in the novelistic sense: a group of specific people with specific relationships and specific histories who exist outside the novel’s romantic plot and give it weight. Jimenez populates the town with enough secondary characters that it feels inhabited rather than decorative, and Daniel’s embeddedness in it — his history there, his knowledge of its people, the way the town knows him in return — is rendered with genuine warmth.

Alexis’s gradual opening to the town is one of the novel’s more carefully calibrated arcs. She arrives with the city person’s combination of condescension and curiosity, moves through genuine engagement as she meets its people, and arrives at something like appreciation. The arc does not demand that she become a small-town person; it asks only that she become capable of seeing what a good one looks like.

Our rating: 4.1/5 — A emotionally mature romance that takes the class-difference premise seriously and gives it characters worthy of the tension.

Reading Guides

• Abby Jimenez Books in Order: Complete Reading Guide