The Friend Zone

Across Abby Jimenez’s six novels, she has created a world in which her characters all have connections to each other, and the narratives also contain deliberate references to Jimenez’s personal life. While each novel can easily stand alone, reading the novels in the order of publication will reveal multiple references and connections that might not otherwise be apparent. For example, Josh Copeland of The Friend Zone is cousins with Adrian Copeland in Life’s Too Short. The main characters in each novel habitually make appearances in other books; often, Jimenez introduces them briefly in one novel, then follows up with a narrative that focuses on these initially minor characters’ own lives and love stories.

Jimenez also uses the setting to engineer specificity and continuity across her interconnected narratives. All six novels take place in either California or in midwestern states such as Minnesota and South Dakota, and the characters sometimes travel between these locations. Significantly, Jimenez draws upon her own life experience to make these settings authentic, for she has lived and owned bakeries in several of these areas. Additionally, all of Jimenez’s novels mention the bakery called Nadia Cakes, which is Jimenez’s own real-world bakery.