Yours Truly — Part of Your World Book 2

A Fake Relationship Written in Letters

Yours Truly is the second novel in Abby Jimenez’s Part of Your World series, and it sets two rival emergency-room doctors, Bryce and Livy, on a collision course. Thrown together by professional friction and pushed toward a fake relationship to manage an annoying ex and an overbearing family, they begin exchanging letters — and the letters, written to maintain a fiction, quietly become the most honest thing in either of their lives. By the time they notice, the feelings have stopped being pretend.

It is one of Jimenez’s funniest books and one of her warmest, built on an epistolary device she executes with exceptional charm. The medical workplace gives the rivals-to-lovers dynamic something real to push against, and a chronic-illness subplot is handled with the same sensitivity she brought to the fertility storyline in The Friend Zone. The result is a romance that earns its sentiment by being genuinely funny first.

The Epistolary Structure

The letters between Bryce and Livy are the novel’s formal innovation and its greatest strength. The fake relationship provides the premise, but the letters provide the emotional architecture. Written initially for strategic purposes — to maintain the fiction of the relationship for their respective families and colleagues — the letters quickly become something neither character intended: a space where the performance of affection shades into actual affection, where the invented version of intimacy begins to generate real intimacy.

This is the epistolary tradition deployed with contemporary self-awareness. Bryce and Livy know they are writing letters to maintain a fiction; they also know, before they fully acknowledge it to themselves, that the letters are doing something else. The gap between what they tell themselves the letters are for and what the letters are actually doing is where the novel’s emotional tension lives.

Jimenez earns the epistolary element by making the letters funny before she makes them moving. The early letters are strategic, slightly formal, occasionally awkward. The later letters are warmer, more particular, more revealing. The change tracks the relationship’s change, and the reader experiences it in the same medium through which the characters experience it.

The Medical Workplace Setting

The hospital setting gives the rivals-to-lovers trope something more specific than workplace proximity to push against. Bryce and Livy are not simply colleagues who dislike each other — they are colleagues in a high-stakes profession where their respective reputations and abilities are constantly visible and constantly compared. The competence each must maintain in their professional role is in tension with the vulnerability the letters require. The fake relationship is most convincing to their colleagues precisely when it’s least convenient for the characters themselves.

Jimenez writes the medical context with the same research-grounded specificity she brought to the health storyline in The Friend Zone. The procedural detail is accurate enough to feel earned rather than decorative, and it grounds the romance in a professional world with real weight.

The Chronic Illness Subplot

The chronic illness element — handled with the same sensitivity and specificity that characterized the fertility storyline in The Friend Zone — adds genuine stakes to the romance beyond the fake-relationship mechanics. The health dimension is not a plot obstacle but a character reality: it shapes how one of the leads understands their own future and what they believe they can ask of a partner. Jimenez’s consistent engagement with health themes across her catalog reflects both personal experience and a commitment to representation that the genre often avoids.

Grumpy/Sunshine and Its Variations

The grumpy/sunshine dynamic is one of contemporary romance’s most durable formulas, and Yours Truly uses it with awareness of its conventions. Bryce’s grumpiness is not generic but specific: the particular withdrawn quality of someone who has learned to protect themselves through professional distance. Livy’s sunshine is not mere cheerfulness but a specific way of engaging with the world that reflects her history. Jimenez’s version of the formula works because she gives both poles psychological roots, which transforms a genre convention into a character study.

Anxiety, Honesty, and the Appeal of the Slow Reveal

Beyond its formal cleverness, Yours Truly is notable for how seriously it takes its heroine’s interior life. Livy is written as someone navigating real anxiety, and Jimenez resists the temptation to treat that anxiety as a quirk to be cured by love; instead it is a lasting feature of how Livy moves through the world, something Bryce comes to understand and accommodate rather than fix. This is consistent with Jimenez’s broader project of giving romance heroines genuine psychological texture, and it is why the eventual emotional payoff feels earned rather than engineered. The letters are the perfect vehicle for this kind of character: writing gives Livy and Bryce a way to be honest that their guarded, professionally competent in-person selves cannot manage, and the reader watches two people who are excellent at performing composure gradually drop it on the page. The pleasure of the book is the slow reveal — the steady accumulation of small confidences until the fiction they agreed to maintain has quietly become the truest relationship either of them has. It is romance built on the conviction that intimacy is something you write your way into, one honest sentence at a time.

The Verdict

Yours Truly is contemporary romance executed with unusual craft: the letters between Bryce and Livy are the highlight, moving from awkward and funny to genuinely moving as the relationship deepens, and the high-stakes hospital setting grounds the fake-dating conceit in a world with real weight. Jimenez handles the chronic-illness thread with care, and her grumpy/sunshine pairing works because both poles have psychological roots. It reads well alone but benefits from Part of Your World first, and trope-wary readers may find the fake relationship familiar.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — One of Jimenez’s funniest novels and the one with the warmest emotional payoff, with letters that earn their sentimentality by being genuinely funny first.

Reading Guides

• Abby Jimenez Books in Order: Complete Reading Guide