With Any Luck by Ashley Poston

Every person she kisses finds their true love, and it’s never her—until now, in this funny and magically romantic short story by the New York Times bestselling author of The Dead Romantics.
 

Audrey Love is cursed to be the person before you find your soulmate, the girl you dump for your true love. So when her best friend disappears hours before his Valentine’s Day wedding, Audrey fears that she did the unthinkable and kissed him at last night’s bachelor party. With help from the best man, she retraces her steps to find the missing groom and, with any luck, a true love of her own.
 

Ashley Poston’s With Any Luck is part of The Improbable Meet-Cute, irresistibly romantic stories about finding love when and where you least expect it. They can be read or listened to in one sitting. Let’s make a date of it.
 

This was short novella was fine and a quick sub-25 minute read. Part of the Amazon’s The Improbable Meet-Cute Series featuring short stores themed around Valentines Day written by popular romance authors, I found With Any Luck to be cute yet inconsequential.

50 pages requires a concise and tidy story which With Any Luck manages by covering only two days worth of plot during Audrey Love’s best male friend’s wedding. At the wedding she unfortunately is greeted by the fiance’s best man who she had a fling with on a previous trip. The novella is essentially an enemies to lovers setup but the short length does the trope no favors. The only way to reverse the animosity is via misunderstandings which I’ve mentioned many times as being one of my pet peeves. This is exemplified by Audrey believing she ruined the wedding when her best friend goes missing the morning of the wedding following a drunken night out she can’t remember.

However, the fact that enemies to lovers romantic interest was there during the drunken night and knows exactly what happened to Audrey feels like a cheap gotcha plot twist. The entire conflict could’ve been avoided had he just told Audrey what transpired the night before instead of the two of them running around town hysterically (why is he also panicking when he has a better idea of what’s going on than Audrey).

I feel like grouch critically reviewing a short novella that’s obviously intended to be a predictably cute quick comfy read. Romance however is not my preferred genre of choice and it needs to either be rom-com hilarious or nuanced and deep to interest me. I found this to be neither and quite silly which is disappointing since I liked some of Ashley Poston’s previous works. On that note, you know I will be buying and eating discounted Valentines Day chocolates on Feb 15th on my own and regretting nothing-