Genre: Gaylit, Lesfic, Contemporary
LGBTQ+ Category: Bi, Poly
Reviewer: Lucy
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About The Book
A F/F/M romance novel about having it all.
Vicky and Sharon had a great place to live, jobs they liked, excellent neighbors and landlords, and a four-year-old daughter they loved. Ten years after they went from best friends to lovers, they were married and prospering, starting to talk about the one thing they were missing. What came next?
Marco Hidalgo was still trying to decide how to tell his wife his show was cancelled when he got home and found the note. Four years after they went from co-workers to married, it was over. It didn’t seem to matter what came next, so he reached out to the one person who was always on his side.
When newly-single Marco turned up on Vicky’s movie set, she called Sharon to ask What If. Sharon said Why Not, and Marco said it might be revenge. Vicky said if it wasn’t at least a little bit revenge, she’d be concerned. So they tried it, and it worked, and now all three of them had to figure out what came next.
Adult situations, themes, and language; 77300 words and a happy ending.
The Review
Undertow is like reading all the fun celebrity magazines and articles but getting the real deal instead of the glamorous window dressings. Set in the world of the Hollywood-adjacent, this strangely sweet novel follows the intertwining lives of Vicky, Sharon, and Marco.
Vicky and Sharon are madly in love, have a great relationship and a precocious daughter. They have great lives, good friends, and careers that allow them to do a lot of the things they want to do.
Marco thought he had the same, until his show was cancelled and he came home to find his wife had left him. Emotionally bruised, Marco is intrigued when Vicky and Sharon approach him for a friends-with-benefits arrangement.
This novel is so well-written, with snippets of lives that are outside the every-day norm, but intriguing for just that reason. One of the things I loved about it is that Sharon and Vicky work on their relationship. They have real conversations about what’s good, what might need attention, and what either of them can’t see working. As bisexual women in a committed lesbian relationship, they both feel like they’re missing ‘the d’. And so they start looking for someone who could fit into their relationship, and provide an aspect of their sex lives that they’d like to improve.
Marco’s wife has left him with absolutely no explanation. He’s feeling unloved, unwanted, unsexy. His insecurities have left him a little raw. So Vicky’s invitation gives him the chance to lick his wounds, have some great no-strings sex, and to emotionally regroup.
I loved how Caluen writes about this big, sexy man having insecurities about his own body, his acting, and his ability to maintain a relationship. Marco has real conversations with Vicky and Sharon about all those things.
Undertow was a fabulous story filled with quirky, interesting characters, hot sex, and a fun backdrop of theater and movie stars living their best lives. This was my first book by Alexandra Caluen, but it definitely won’t be the last.
The Reviewer
I’m an avid reader who loves pretty much all genres except math textbooks. As a kid, my parents exposed me to everything from fairies, hobbits, and dragons to the biographies of interesting people around the world, interspersed with poetry, plays, and music. Into adulthood, I spent a lot of years with my nose buried in various textbooks. Now, I read whatever grabs my fancy.
