Abby Jimenez occupies a specific corner of contemporary romance: she writes emotional, sometimes very funny novels about people who are competent adults managing difficult lives, and her great skill is making the warmth and the depth coexist without either undermining the other. Yours Truly, which follows a pair of rival doctors who begin corresponding anonymously through a hospital letter-writing program, demonstrates that skill at its most refined.
Briana Ortiz is a doctor who needs a favor — the kind of favor that requires asking someone she doesn’t particularly want to ask. Jacob Maddox is her professional rival for a permanent position at their hospital, and he is the kind of person whose very competence is a form of obstacle. The letter-writing program that brings them together is a hospital initiative, the kind of well-intentioned administrative program that creates unexpected consequences, and the anonymous correspondence that develops between them is where both characters are most honest — which is the first problem, and eventually the primary one.
Jimenez structures the novel around what Briana knows that Jacob doesn’t, which creates a specific kind of dramatic irony that romantic comedies have used since Shakespeare and that epistolary romance has been refining for centuries: the reader and one character watching another fall for someone they haven’t yet identified. Jacob’s letters are candid and self-aware in a way his professional behavior isn’t, and the gap between the man on paper and the man across the professional rivalry is what Briana is navigating throughout. The moment of recognition, when it comes, is structured with genuine care.
The medical setting is rendered with Jimenez’s characteristic specificity — she does not use it as generic prestige backdrop but as a world with its own rhythms, hierarchies, and emotional demands that shape who these characters are and how they move through their lives. The professional stakes are real, which means the romantic development has to happen alongside genuine obstacles rather than being the only obstacle in the story.
This is a particularly satisfying audio experience — Jimenez’s close-first-person narration translates beautifully to listening, and the dual perspectives, when the novel toggles between them, give the listener information the characters don’t have in a way that makes the tension almost unbearably pleasurable. For readers who found The Hating Game‘s workplace rivals dynamic compelling and want a medical twist on it, this is the book. Readers who have read Jimenez’s earlier The Friend Zone or Part of Your World will find her at her most structurally confident here.
The series this book belongs to features different central couples but a consistent world, and Jimenez’s ability to build community across her novels means the supporting characters feel like people worth spending more time with. The medical world becomes a genuine setting rather than a backdrop over the course of the series.
What Yours Truly finally argues is that the person you are when no one is watching is the person worth knowing. Jacob in his letters is more fully himself than Jacob managing his professional performance. Briana falls for the version of him that writes honestly about what he’s afraid of, and when the two versions of him collapse into one, the impact is exactly as earned as Jimenez intended it to be.