It took me almost three weeks to come upon Robin L.McLaughlin’s five-star review of the Kindle edition of Threesome. McLaughlin’s one of Amazon’s Top 500 Reviewers, and her words warmed this old heart mightily. Threesome was published over forty years ago as a Berkley paperback, and I do believe this is the first review it’s ever received. (Jill Emerson, as you might imagine, is over the moon, and starry-eyed in the bargain; she’s gone all Sally Fields: “You like me! You really like me!”)

I’ve posted the full review on Jill’s page. But here’s a taste:

“I just now got around to reading one and chose Threesome as my first. (Though this is bisexual polyamorous pulp, rather than lesbian pulp.) There’s no denying that the intention of this sort of novel was to shock and titillate, to appeal to the prurient side of the reading masses. And there’s no denying that Threesome delivers on that promise. But to dismiss the novel as merely a piece of salacious pulp would be to miss the forest for the trees.

“Threesome has an unusual structure in that the chapters rotate between the three characters, and all are supposedly chapters that each character contributes to a manuscript for what they initially intend to be an erotic bestseller. These fictional book chapters even include asides, notes to the others, and comments on word and grammar usage. Yet far from being distracting, these add to the humor. The structure not only works, but it works very well as the story is revealed in layers from the past and present.

“I count twenty-five passages that I underlined on my Kindle while reading. Some because they were laugh-out-loud funny, some because of clever wording, and some because they were insightful. Yes, I said insightful, and I meant it. It feels really odd (embarrassing?) to admit that one of my most highlighted books on my Kindle is an erotic pulp novel, but there you are. The funny is what surprised me the most. Threesome is downright hilarious, not because of the subject matter, but because of how witty Block is. His writing style is wonderful…”

Read the rest on Jill Emerson’s Page—