With Any Luck - Ashley Poston - ★

AUTHOR: Ashley Poston

SERIES: The Improbable Meet-Cute, #5

GENRE: Romance Short Story.

PUBLICATION DATE: January 23, 2024

RATING: 1 star.

In a Nutshell: Another illogical insta-love short story masquerading as a “meet-cute”! Better than Story #6, but by a minuscule margin.

Plot Preview:

Audrey Love has a special ability – anyone she kisses finds their soulmate on the next day. However, she herself is destined to stay single. When she is asked to be the “best man” at her friend Rhett’s wedding, she is annoyed to find that the bride’s “maid of honour” is the bride’s best friend Theo, who did something annoying to Audrey when they first met. However, on the big day, Rhett goes missing, and Audrey is forced to assist Theo in searching for her lost friend. What doesn’t help is that Audrey has a hangover after the bachelor party and she can’t remember if she kissed Rhett last night. Did she indirectly help him find his true soulmate? Can she find Rhett in time for the wedding without being distracted by Theo’s ultra-attractive personality? (Please picture me rolling my eyes while writing this last sentence!)

The story comes to us in Audrey’s first-person perspective.

This is the fifth standalone story in the 'The Improbable Meet-Cute’ series, described on Amazon as “irresistibly romantic stories about finding love when and where you least expect it.”

Woohoos:

🥳 A good premise about being “the one before the one.” Would have been great to see it executed well.

🥳 A quick read at just forty pages. Doesn’t take more than half an hour.

🥳 Again, a freebie thanks to my Prime subscription. Didn’t lose extra money over this!

🥳 Those who enjoy my rare rant reviews get a bonus rant within a week! (You’re welcome! 😎)

Mehs: (For a change, I have used almost as many question marks as exclamation marks!!!)

🙄 Yet again, everything occurs within a day. Unlike Story #6, this short duration made a bit more sense in this book as all the events were meant to occur on a wedding day. The romance, however, is still too farfetched to be believable.

🙄 Correct me if I’m wrong, but meet-cute isn't the same as insta-love, right? Why are both considered the same in this series? Nothing about this story indicated “meet-cute”.

🙄 All the main characters are in their thirties. Not for one minute did they act their age!

🙄 The story comes from two timelines, Present Day and Last Night. Quite ambitious for a short fiction, but very muddling because of the use of first-person and the repetition of the same events from two perspectives: actual facts and unreliable hangover memory.

🙄 A female "best man" and a male “maid of honour”? I’m all for the idea, but when such quirky decisions are taken, shouldn’t they be addressed in the story? I was quite confused at the start when a feminine-sounding first-person narration spoke about becoming the “best man.” Wouldn’t it be better to call them Best Woman/Lady and Man of Honour?

🙄 All the inner rambling about Theo’s attractiveness! Gaah! Focus on your task, woman! Find the missing groom!

🙄 Take a wild shot at how many times I would like to read about the FMC taking tequila shots from “Ye Old Bartender’s cleavage”! (Hint: The answer is less than the star rating earned by this story!)

🙄 Princess Ilaria from Story #6 gets a passing mention in this, even though the author is different and the setting is different and even the country is different! Why rake up those bad memories for me? 😬

MAJOR SPOILERS BELOW! Apologies for going into spoilers, but I had to vent!

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🙄 Audrey is a unreliable narrator because of her memory being blank after the drinking binge. This is used to deliberately mislead us several times – not a fan of this trope.

🙄 Imagine hating someone, and yet sleeping with him TWICE just because he’s hot!?

🙄🙄🙄 And the above makes for a “meet-cute” romance?!

🙄 Audrey has such a big hangover that she can’t remember anything about what happened last night, but not so big as to stop her from running around town to look for Rhett without any physical after-effects of the alcoholic binge. Sheesh!

🙄 Theo hasn’t seen the groom all day long, but he waits till 4pm to wake up “best man” Audrey to help locate the groom? The wedding is at 6pm! What optimism!!!

🙄 What sensible person would have such a wild bachelor party ONE NIGHT before the wedding?

🙄 Furthermore, what sensible person would drink so much on the night prior to an important event that they cannot even wake up till 4pm?

🙄 Audrey is annoyed with Theo because on their first time sleeping together, he didn’t kiss her *on the lips* as he wasn’t ready to find a soulmate. But he did kiss her… ahemmm… everywhere else.

🙄 Audrey sleeps *again* with Theo but she is so drunk that until the topic comes up the next day (after more than an hour of wandering across town in each other’s company), she doesn’t even remember that she had slept with him the previous night. Even worse, Theo wasn’t drunk, but has no qualms about “making love” to a girl who is totally wasted. RIP, consent!

🙄 For more than half the story, Audrey tells us that she kissed Rhett the previous night. And all of a sudden, she remembers that she did not. This is the minor problem. The major problem is how she says that she considers Rhett her brother and there’s no way there can be a romantic connection between them. Errrmmm….. no further comments.

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~~~~~~~~~END OF SPOILERS~~~~~~~~~

All in all, I did hope for better luck from this one, but the ridiculousness of the situation through which Audrey and Theo come together made me forget all my good intentions of being lenient and going with the flow with overanalysing anything.

I have heard a lot about this author’s romance novels but haven’t had the pleasure of reading any. Based on my current experience, I feel like she might be better at writing full-length novels. Well, at least I hope so.

Yet another no from me. Might work better for readers with more patience for insta-romances based on a strong physical attraction and no qualms about questionable moral situations and no issues with unreliable narrators.

This standalone story is a part of the ‘The Improbable Meet-Cute’ collection, and is currently available free to Amazon Prime subscribers.

Skipping story 4: “Drop, Cover, and Hold On” because it doesn’t even have a 3-star average rating on GR. Better if I Drop the series order, Cover my eyes to this title, and Hold On to the next story with my fingers crossed.

The remaining three tales – the first three in series order – are the highest rated of the six stories, so there is hope yet! Will the next story finally live up to the “meet-cute” tag, or will it result in yet another rant? Stay tuned to this Romance Grinch’s updates to know more!