Mild spoiler warning: this review contains spoilers for Can’t Say Goodbye, Football Royalty and Eden Finley’s Fake Boyfriend series.
I’ve just finished my first MMM book.
Can’t Say Goodbye, by Australian author Eden Finley, is the love story of Brady Talon and the two Navy SEALs he can’t walk away from, Guy “Kit” Kitchener and Jimmy Prescott.
It is listed as a standalone, but in my mind it’s a sequel to Football Royalty and a spin-off of Finley’s Fake Boyfriend series.
READ MORE: ‘His dads are soooo embarrassing’: my Football Royalty review
And if you’re wondering what MMM means, I had to learn the shorthand too.
What is MMM?
In romance publishing, the letters tell you who is in the relationship.
MM is a romance between two men, which covers everything I’ve reviewed from Finley so far.
MMM is a romance between three men who are all in a relationship with each other, sometimes called a throuple or a triad.
That last part matters. This isn’t a love triangle where someone has to choose, and nobody is left out by the final chapter.
The happily ever after belongs to all three.
What is Can’t Say Goodbye?
Finley self-published the book on January 25, 2023.
We first meet Brady as a side character in his brother Peyton Miller’s story, Football Royalty.
Both are the sons of Marcus Talon and Shane Miller, the couple at the centre of Blindsided, the fourth Fake Boyfriend book.
Brady’s story starts with one fun night that turns into a regular thing none of the three men planned for.
“Our quick hellos are followed by drawn out goodbyes,” Brady says in the book’s blurb.
He also sums up why the arrangement works for him.
“Kit is the stern nurturer I need. He’s the caretaker, the solid presence,” the blurb reads. “Prescott enables my wild ways.”
The story is told from all three men’s perspectives.
The surprise: Kit and Prescott weren’t already a couple
I liked how the dynamic between the three of them works.
Going in, I assumed Kit and Prescott would be an established couple who bring Brady into their relationship.
They aren’t, and that was a surprise to me.
It means the book has more than one romance to figure out. Kit and Prescott have to work out their love for each other as well as their love for Brady, and that was fun to discover.
The real conflict is distance
Here’s what I liked most.
The three-way relationship isn’t the main source of conflict.
Yes, there is discussion about what people will think. As the blurb puts it, being in a relationship with two men isn’t good for Brady’s public image, his brother’s NFL career, or the media frenzy that surrounds his “famously queer family”.
But the real obstacle is geography.
Come graduation, Brady has to move across the country. Kit and Prescott are Navy SEALs, at least for the first part of the book, so seeing each other, let alone Brady, can be difficult.
The three settle on a plan to meet up once a year, and every reunion makes the next goodbye harder.
It is a long-distance romance that happens to have three people in it.
More Talon and Miller
Like Football Royalty, this is a book about Talon and Miller all grown up.
I think we get a lot more of them here than we did in Peyton’s story, and I was living for it.
READ MORE: Blindsided: where we first met Talon and Miller
Damon King is back, too
I loved the appearance of Damon King, the sports agent who led me to the Fake Boyfriend series in the first place.
Can’t Say Goodbye lets us see how Damon has grown up, and how successful his agency, King Sports, has become.
We got an idea of that in the Puckboys series, but it is fun to see it in detail.
What other readers think
The reviews I read landed in a similar place.
Heather at Bookcase and Coffee wrote that second-generation books can feel crowded by the parents, and that Finley got the balance right by keeping the focus on Brady and his men. She predicted it would be one of her top reads of 2023.
Resch Reads praised the way Finley handled all three perspectives, and had one complaint: the ending felt a little fast.
That reviewer wanted another chapter or two of the trio enjoying their happily ever after. I can’t help but agree.
Should you read it?
If you’ve read Blindsided and Football Royalty, yes.
You get Talon and Miller as dads, Damon as a success story, and a romance where the three leads are never the problem.
This disclaimer in this book also made my giggle: “Saxon James is the worst person in the world. But I love her anyway. Also if it’s in a disclaimer, it means it’s true. Like the internet.”
Finley has also released The Talon-Miller Legacy which starts with Blindsided, includes Talon and Miller’s section of Final Play (their wedding), skips eighteen years, finishes with Football Royalty, and Can’t Say Goodbye featuring Talon and Miller’s kids all grown up.
If MMM is new to you, as it was to me, this is an easy place to start, because the hard part of the relationship is one most readers will recognise.
It’s the goodbye.
What’s next? I’m moving onto Eden Finley’s Famous series next!