The Friend Zone - Abby Jimenez

Title: The Friend Zone 
Author: Abby Jimenez 
Format: E-book
Rating: 2 stars 

Reader friends, I wanted to like this book. I really did. I wanted to fawn over it as much as I fawned over Life's too Short (yes, I read her third book first).  This book, however, fell short in so many ways.  

Kristen, the lady MC, is great at some things, but so, so stubborn at other things, and most of the things where she dug her heels in made me so frustrated.  She was told over and over and over by Josh that he loved her no matter what and it wasn't until something VERY BAD happened that she believed it. Josh, to be fair, spent a lot of time talking about how he ONLY wanted children that he helped create, and did not want to adopt.  I could understand some of where Kristen was coming from in this regard.  However, after Josh realized this was what was so upsetting to her, he changed a lot having time to think about it, and he came to the conclusion he'd have kids or not have kids or adopt or whatever if it meant he could be with Kristen.

When the novel started with Kristen slamming those breaks on and causing Josh to bump the back of her truck, I thought their interaction was going to pave the way for a book that was truly a rom-com filled with humor and wit with the romance.  Most of the book ended up being fairly devastating. I certainly think that romance books can have sad and tragic events in them, but when the book is mostly described as a romantic comedy type book, it should veer more towards that than full on car wreck.

I DID love that the MC Kristen made and sold her own dog stairs, clothes, and toys - showing how much she loved that added a depth to her character that would have been lacking otherwise.  It also gave opportunity for Josh and Kristen to develop a relationship and get to know each other since he was helping her build the stairs that she sold. 

The friendships in the book were technically great - that was one plus for this book.  The characters all had great relationships with their friends and these relationships were well built and developed.  If every part of the story had been that well developed and well written this would have been much more of a bang up book in my opinion. 

The back and forth between the two main characters was frustrating to me - each of them was like "I love you," and then just didn't communicate about any of the details that they needed each other to know.  This led to a lot of confusion and drama that was very unnecessary to the story as a whole.  A lot of the issues could have been solved a lot earlier if they'd just talked to each other about what was really going on! 

Overall, this book was a bit of a dud for me.  If you've read this book, what did you think?  Let me know in the comments - I'm looking forward to hearing what you thought!