Book Review - Triple Sec by TJ Alexander

So, if you joined my non-monogamy book club, you noticed that I mildly lost it over my enjoyment of Triple Sec by TJ Alexander - and now I'm on a tear through all their writing because romance novels by someone who is queer and shares my values are a delight. But I'm here to give a little review of the book and its representation of polyamory for everyone.

The short, limited spoiler version is that I LOVED this book, and it is excellent, honest polyamory representation of someone new to polyamory getting with people who are more experienced and having a bumpy (because monogamy hangover) but Happily-Ever-After (because romance novel) time about it. 5 stars.

The longer version begins with the fact that I'm so happy some of these people have real jobs (2 out of 3 of the triad partners are not in what I think of as romance-novel-only jobs - they're a bartender and a lawyer) and the class and logistics issues of people with different incomes and schedules dating get mentioned in real ways. Because polyamorous people are already a subculture, we sometimes end up cutting across the social spectra in ways we might not if we were monogamous; and I've been in a lot of polycules where conversations about either different relationships having very different kinds of dates or ability to plan different vacations; or people having feelings about being treated by better off partners, came up, so Mel (our main character, a bartender, who meets Bebe, a lawyer, and her spouse Kade, an extremely successful artist) having some of those feelings felt very real.

The book has a couple well-written and not gratuitous queer sex scenes; it covers for two characters the pretty common polyamorous experience of grieving one relationship while falling in love in a new one and having some mixed feelings about that; it has good representation of lesbians, triads, and a nonbinary character who is not tokenized.

For the specifically polyamorous content, it does a great job having concrete examples of how couple's privilege plays out in little concrete ways even with good intentions - and how openly acknowledging it can look. There was a lot of very realistic feeling moments of Mel grappling with this all being new to her (buying books and deciding she only needed to read half of them; having a friend decide she was safer to come out to now, and apologizing for ways she'd talked to them previous and assumptions she'd made about their relationship; trying to grab tightly to control with a written out list of agreements and editing them frequently because they didn't actually work that well, for example). It felt very real and very of my life in a way that romance novels normally don't.

As someone who has mostly gotten really good deep polyamory representation in sci-fi, it was lovely to get it on earth, in the current day, for fully human characters, no apocalypse required. I recommend this book if you want a cozy rom-com with good values.

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You can join my non-monogamy book club here (we're picking May's book now)

And I'm teaching a class based on my book Monogamy? In This Economy? about 3+ adult households on April 22, tickets are here.