Emmalita’s review piqued my interest in Knot That Simple so I popped over and picked it up. It’s a very fast read (126 pages, apparently, although on the online Kindle reader it all melds into a pleasant blur). I got through it in short chunks in an afternoon whenever I needed a break from writing a paper. I was on Livejournal when omegaverse was created and I do like it although I only really ever read it in gay fanfiction, so straight omegaverse was out of my wheelhouse. It’s good to see what other people are getting up to with the trope! For me personally, I don’t mind the biological soulmate thing so that didn’t rub me the wrong way. The basic plot here is that there are genetic alpha/omega people, and then the majority of the world is betas, who somehow have no clue there’s this whole secret biological sex world happening. The alphas have an omega they’re spending their whole lives pining for until they show up. Gabriella is a Brazilian woman who never knew that she was an omega until recently. She’s had a hard life, with a neglectful mother and having to raise her daughter on her own. She’s used to putting everyone before her and doesn’t understand why anyone would keep her around. There’s some sort of blood matching system set up in this world so they send off her blood and she gets matched to three alphas who live in Ireland. Off she goes to move to Ireland with her six year old! Fortunately she knows English from watching movies so it’s okay.
I liked some of the story beats here, especially Gabriella learning to trust that the men did love her and found her beautiful and desirable. I also liked the support system the Irish village provides for the new family. The descriptions of Ireland are beautiful and made me want to pop over there. Each of the characters has to work through separate low self esteem issues and I was glad to see open communication being utilized throughout after some initial lack of it. Lorcan in particular was driving me up the wall with his stony silence and then Gabriella misinterpreting it as rejection. The downside is that this book is so short, so none of the characters get to be very fleshed out and their relationship progresses extremely quickly, even for omegaverse. I think there’s a happy medium with this trope, where you can have the fated mates and the immediate bond, but also develop the relationship at a more measured pace and play around with the question of choice and consent in an interesting way. I thought that the three men all had different personalities but I wanted to know more about their back stories and their worries, especially with whatever had made Lorcan so closed off and constantly thinking he was broken. He seemed to have a very positive relationship with his parents and I never grasped what the background was for his issues. I also wanted to know if these guys were having sex with each other for the years they were waiting around for Gabriella, because they all knew a lot about each other’s kinks and were very comfortable having group sex together. That seemed like an interesting prequel to me (then again, I am gay so this is where my mind goes). They also could have explained a lot more to Gabriella throughout — telling her in bed very important information about how she can get pregnant once they all have sex when they’re actively about to have sex seemed like more of a need for the author to explain why they have three kids at the end than a hallmark of a practical discussion.
All of this to say, I did get through the book zippily and enjoyed the writing and the overall story, but I wish it would have been longer and more detailed. This felt more like an abridged version of a better book. I do get that romance authors have to churn these out to make a living, and I hope my $3.33 helped in some small way, but I will go back to my long gay omegaverse fanfiction (until the next time I see a review from Emmalita that draws me in!).
