Until Ashlyn-- Aurora Rose Reynolds

This is the third installment in the Until Her series, which includes Until July and Until June. Those are secondary novels to the Until series. I say this because this is probably the weakest book in the series. Mostly due to plot holes that seemed highly unrealistic to me, and then secondly because there were a fair amount of spelling errors. Now with that negativity out of the way, I still enjoyed the book.

Dillon Keck knew Ashlyn Mayson was drunk when she suggested they get married. He knew he should have taken her back to their hotel room and put her to bed. Instead, he did what he had been craving to do since the moment they met.
Claim her as his.
Waking up married in Vegas isn't something Ashlyn Mayson ever thought would happen to her. Having Dillon, her boss, a man she thinks is a dick, insist they stay married is absurd, but every time he touches her, she gets lost in him and wonders if maybe they are meant to be together.
But someone isn't happy for Dillon and Ashlyn and their new found romance, and they're willing to do anything to keep them apart. Even commit murder.

In one of the other Until books, we hear about how Ashlyn’s boss makes her change how she dresses to work, and is a complete dickhead. All she does is complain, but her cousins know that deep down she has feelings for him. Here enter the plot issues that got to me:

Getting married in Vegas while drunk, done before and done better. I don’t see how she wasn’t extremely angry at the man who just trapped her in a “loveless” marriage. Personally, even if the man I had a secret crush on married me, I would be irritated. She puts up barely any fight besides semi-withholding sex. 

(Now that is something that was fantastic…the chemistry between these two is off the charts. Dillion is so caring, that when they meet in bed you would almost expect him to be soft. Ha-ha, that is not the case. At all.)

Now my other issue is with the murdering, stalker thing. Not much of a spoiler since it says it in the synopsis, so this will be vague as to not spoil more. If he was actually stalking her, he would have realized something was not right. It seemed to me sort of cheap, almost like she needed a quick way to add drama and suspense. I feel like there could have been better ways to tie it into the story than what was chosen.

Since the unhappy thoughts are out of the way, I will gladly read this book again, because while the plot was a bit cliché and contrived, it was cute and entertaining. (A bit expected since these story points have been used so many times before.) It is a feel-good book you can pick up and read whenever you want. Not original but enjoyable.

Last Year's Mistake-- Gina Ciocca

You ever read one of those books that as you're reading it you just don't care? That's kind of how I felt about “Last Year's Mistake”. It just didn't seem to have very much substance. Everything that happened was ready immature. I know that it was supposed to be a high school drama but everything was blown out of proportion. Yes, I know that kids make stupid things epically huge, I just don't really see how this would be the case.

The main character, Kelsey, was genuinely sick and instead of having people be concerned about her (which I feel would have happened), people were making fun of her. Don’t get me wrong I understand how that made her feel I feel alienated. What I don't understand how she would think it was a good idea to alienate the one person who truly cared about her?  David was there for her FOR EVERYTHING. Yes, he made stupid decisions but he's a teenage boy they don't usually use their upper brain, if you know what I'm saying. But her reaction to everything that occurred was probably the worst that could ever happen.

David, David, David. Let’s talk about what he did. His declaration was selfish. HE didn’t really need to do it at that point in time. I get that her being sick brought it all to the fore-front. BUT I feel like he would have told her prior to a few days before her leaving. Like you know when we didn’t really know what was wrong? When there was the stressful admission about her not wanting to die a virgin? OR you know he could have shown her how he felt by not going to the dance that night… but those are just suggestions. I mean, if my best friend was in the hospital the day of the dance I would not have gone.

Maybe I'm just overthinking things but there was definitely something I did not enjoy about this but it just seemed to drag on. Originally, I told my friend that I would recommend this book for her to read, so that I would have somebody to talk to about it. Now, though, I don't even want her to read it.  I don't want my friends to think these are books that I enjoy. It was childish and I'm not really okay with all the drinking that occurred even though I do know that it's something that happens in high school aged kids.

The book, however, was written for high school-aged kids to read. It just felt to me like was normalizing behavior that shouldn’t be acceptable. Also, how easily she brings up kids having sex when they’re freshman or sophomores. That's not something that should be happening and I know that it is, believe me. Studies show that kids are having sex at younger and younger ages, so do we really need books flippantly adding it in. I think that, especially, if your book is geared towards young adults you need to walk cautiously when it comes to those kinds of hot topics. And if you are going more realistic make sure you add in basic knowledge to keep kids safe. There was no mention of safe sex or anything.

Now that being said I did read this book in a little over two hours. I was intrigued with David and Kelsey relationship. I needed to know what happened between them, but when I found out it was just BLAH. I was waiting for more from them, honestly. It was very anti-climactic when it came to their relationship. I just felt like there definitely needed to be more explosion when it came to them actually resolving their issues. I mean if they were to ever really talk about it. It seemed like they just glazed over their problems. Setting up for a healthy relationship.

The book was okay but probably wouldn't recommend, in case you didn't get that from the rest of my review.