skygiants

Thoughtfully, Aster Glenn Gray has released a new and incredibly charming threesome novella right at a time when devouring a charming novella in a night was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to do!

The Threefold Tie begins at the moment when Civil War vet-turned-bohemian-artist Jack realizes that he has inconveniently fallen in love with his war buddy Everett's wife Sophie. This is especially awkward given that Everett is also his ex for whom he may still have some of the feelings! But obviously one does not bang a married man, and also, as a corollary, one does not bang his wife either, so clearly the only choice is to stoically repress all one's feelings, and/or flee in terror!

Fortunately or unfortunately for Jack, both Everett and Sophie are warm, gregarious, impulsive people who like to both talk about and act on their feelings, so strategy: AVOID! is probably not going to work out so well ...

Threesomes, in my mostly-limited-to-Yuletide experience, are much trickier to write than a two-person romance (so much complicated feelings geometry!) and this book not only does it well but does several things I really like: first of all, it gives all three characters a full POV section, so we get to see why all of them made the (sometimes unfortunate) choices that they did in their respective relationships to date, and what mistaken assumptions have been made about them by the others that aren't borne out from within their interiority; second, it draws all three of them very clearly as from different backgrounds, with different life experiences that color the way they're able to approach the novel concept of 'solve the love triangle with polyamory'; third, it grounds them fully in the complexities of a historical period that has many more interesting ideas about marriage and relationships than are often portrayed in books that take it for granted that literally everyone in the nineteenth century subscribed to exactly the same newsletters and had exactly the same hangups. (

sophia_sol has also pointed out the fun of getting friends-to-lovers, exes-to-lovers, and established marrieds all as part of the romance arc at once.)

For the record, although the novella takes place during the Reconstruction era, it doesn't really engage much with the broader and heavier themes of the Civil War and its aftermath; it's a very cozy, personal book about three people navigating their way to happiness, and as such I found it deeply soothing to read at this time.