Review: Wrong, Right and Fling by Jana Aston

Review for Wrong:

I have very mixed thoughts about this book!

This is a romance (maybe a romcom? It is legitimately funny) about a college student who falls for her gynecologist. Sophie is a college senior going to the gynecologist for the first time because she is planning on having sex for the first time and Luke is a regular at her coffee shop job. He has clearly had a crush on her for a long time but very much dooes not want to act on it. This book is wacky and dirty and has a really engaging main character.

You can tell from very very very early on that Sophie will be getting pregnant before the book ends. It is very much one of those cases where the audience can see exactly where the main characters life is heading far before she realizes. It is kind of secret baby but the baby is only secret from the pregnant lady.

I mostly enjoyed the romance. I thought they had some incredibly sweet moments and that had a lot of chemistry, I absolutely understood why these two people liked each other. But after the dress related romantic gesture I found myself frustrated that these characters weren't ever sitting down to talk about their feelings. Not even in a miscommunication way, though there is one incident where the main character misunderstands a situation causing her to flee. I kind of felt like the author was avoiding writing these hard conversations because it would have been hard to write. They fully have an HEA without really hashing out these issues on the page. I found this pretty annoying as a reader.

I was really glued to this book though! I had a good time reading it, it is very engaging and I was genuinely charmed by the slightly cooky characters.

There is also some slight HIPPA violations and irresponsible doctor stuff going on, but I think that is sort of hand waved in a lot of doctor romances. Bigger issues I had were that I don't love the evil ex girlfriend thing. And I especially don't love that she is evil and she had an abortion that broke them up and our heroine never even considers that route. This is something that is frustrating on a story level, I wanted more discussion about the baby and about the previous relationship, and as a general trend in romance.

Another positive, this book is very funny. My favorite joke might be right after Sophie gets a concussion and Luke is assessing

"Stop, you're annoying me. I'm sleeping."
"You're awake and I need to check your pupils."
"You're a gynecologist."

Which might not seem funny in isolation but made me laugh very much in context. I laughed a lot while reading this book. Sometimes it leans slightly too absurd for me, but most of the time it was great.

This was a really fast fun book that I ultimately think needed a bit more to truly make it great. But I plan on reading book two very soon!

I gave this book three stars

Review for Right:

Well this is my second Jana Aston book today. I did not get many things done today.

This book is pretty unhinged. It is about Everly who has been obsessed with her brothers best friend who is eight years older than her since she was in elementary school. This obsession has recently been notices by him and he is very actively uninterested. If Everly was real I would suggest therapy. But instead his brother Sawyer offers to drive her three hours and aggressively hits on her the whole ride home. We don't know exactly who Everly is in the car with for about 15% of the book but once they exit the car they begin a very intense courtship.

Just like Aston's earlier book she doesn't really have the characters actually talk about the things that I would think would be highly important to talk very in depth about. I don't think Aston is very clear about what about her books scream conflict, she just sort of glosses over things and you just sort of have to accept that the author isn't that great at conflict and there will be one point of contention that starts at about the 75% mark and anything introduced before that just will not be hashed out at all.

The other thing that is the same as Aston's previous book is that I found this story very funny. I laughed out loud multiple times. She is a very funny lady. The unhinged characters in this book particularly made some of it almost feel like a farce but in a positive way. I was charmed by these weirdos. I also thought that this book was just as engrossing as Aston's previous book.

I still find the way she handles conflict annoying, and I really think she has a problem with the way she writes evil women, but I will probably read more of her books because they are very quick and engaging. Also this one did make me cry. Though the tears had nothing to do with the romance which is always a slight bummer.

I gave this book three stars.

Review for Fling:

Well this is where my Jana Aston journey ends.

I continue to be frustrated by the way this author builds conflict and tension. This novella is obviously much shorter than the books that precede it so the author doesn't have the chance to build up plot points that should be conflict but never end up going anywhere. But she does just write a pretty lackluster forced conflict. It was kind of boring. She writes happy and unhinged well but I find her conflict and tension skills to be quite poor.

But that is not the main reason I am no longer reading this author. This book has a gay best friend character who is quite stereotypical. This author didn't write either of the gay male characters I have read in her book well, I would be surprised if I found out she had close queer friends. But the thing that was really the 'never again' moment for me is that the male main character is very blatantly homophobic to this gay man's face and not only does the character seem to not realize but the gay man is just very chipper and doesn't tell his supposed best friend. It makes zero sense for the gay character and makes it pretty clear that the author does not realize that she is at the very least writing a homophobic character. Which obviously makes me think she is either unashamed or unaware of her own homophobia.

I gave this book one star.

I decided to group all three of these reviews because I want to talk about the fact that I overlooked some stuff while I was reading book one that would have lead me to realizing that I am not someone who wants to support this author. Book one had one line about queer people that make me raise an eyebrow but I ignored it due to it just being the one comment. I also was iffy on the way she handled abortion because this book was from 2016 and I sort of thought that the political context around abortion has changed and I was giving Aston the benefit of the doubt that maybe she would handle the topic more sensitively now. But I truly think that Fling shows clear authoral homophobia, and I think I probably should have picked up on some of this much earlier. I mostly wanted to group these together so I don’t encourage people to read this series without knowing that I not only felt very meh about the books on the whole, but that I also think the series, if not the author as well, is homophobic.