The love Bella felt for Jacob did make sense and helped all three main characters grow. If an author wants to have a love triangle, then there should be a reason for it. The characters should learn something and grow from this triangle. Kudos to Stephanie Meyer for creating and solving the perfect love triangle!

Its gotten so bad and prevalent that if you read about a book that has a good plot that gets you excited to read it.Then this paragraph or a variant thereof appears…

“she must chose between “x” or “z”

And you immediately lose interest.

CC Hunters “Born at midnight” takes this to the extreme,not only does it have a love triangle…extra guys keeps appearing out of the blue(not literally)to show interest in the heroine. :/

i love SUGAR DADDY by Lisa Kleypas! I love GAGE TRAVIS! can’t get enough of him!
;)

I thought the love triangle worked really well because it didn’t stretch too long – while reading the third book I remember going CRAZY because of the triangle and saying that if Mercy didn’t make up her mind soon I was going to stop reading and lo and behold, she chose :) While I did like the man she ended up choosing better, I thought both of the men Mercy had were really likable. Briggs didn’t victimize or bash the one who wasn’t chosen; in fact I feel his character is heading for a really interesting character arc because he wasn’t chosen (and not necessarily a romantic one where he has his own book – he has quite the past that needs exploring IMO) after the fourth book. Then again this is an urban fantasy series so I’m not sure how much reader assumption/expectation would play into the likability of the execution of a love triangle.

On the other hand, I don’t like the lover triangle/quartet/howevermanyguysnow that Riley Jenson has in Keri Arthur’s Riley Jenson series, and that’s an urban fantasy series. So me and Riley are currently taking a break right now.

Emma Holly’s Menage, despite the title, gave me the feeling that the heroine had to choose between one or the other so the fact that in the end [SPOILER] she married one but kept the other in the relationship for sexy time here and there just annoyed me [END SPOILER]. Of course, this was before I read all those threesome erotic romances -____-

Unless of course it ends up with all of them together happily ever after, but that doesn’t happen too frequently outside of erotic romances.

That is definitely the crux of my problems with love triangles. Like Jane said, if you like the character…they must do something dastardly at the end to account for them not getting the girl. Which is just disappointing.

Like the Jack/Kate/Sawyer triangle in LOST or the Edward/Bella/Jacob Twilight triangle. No matter the outcome, someone is getting the shaft, and no matter who it is, you feel sad because they are all so likeable.

And for it to be a TRUE love triangle, all characters MUST be likeable. Otherwise, like someone else commented, it’s not really a love triangle but a brief annoying glitch in the hero/heroine story.

Before you go dissing someones new book, r-e-a-d it first,

Ehm, who was dissing anything? You sound just this side of aggressive there. What brought that on?

As for the Haymore title: I saw the ad on SBTB, clicked on it, read more and decided I didn’t want to go there, even though the initial hook of the triangle relationship worked for me. What decided me against, was that I immediately questioned how realistic the legal situation would be handled (she’s a bigamist after all) and then the fact that it did sound like there would be no good solution to this triangle. I’m not in the mood for sad right now.

I am eagerly waiting for the review of A Hint of Wicked, since it’s on my TBR list.

Then you have the triangle where only one person is having the triangle, oterwise known as infidelity. Those sorts are of triangles are behind most divorces, responsible for hirings and firings, replete in Hollywood, the backbone of the bi-sexual world and can be found even in the christian church (everything seems to be a trinity). So don’t look all shocked. Triangles are everywhere.

Before you go dissing someones new book, r-e-a-d it first, then remark on the style of the author and the quality of the relationship between the pages. You may not like a love triangle in your own life, but a fantasy is just that… a fantasy. Isn’t that why we read romance novels – for the fantasies?

I’m dithering.

I liked ‘some’ triangle stories when I was younger but now I just don’t have the fortitude for a bittersweet romance. They generally also call for too much head-hopping and I want the focus of the story to be on the two main protagonist with a definite and well defined HEA. And a pony.

I voted No.

Sugar Daddy really threw me for a loop, because I expected Hardy to be the hero and felt jerked around when not only he wasn’t but then he was suddenly a ‘bad’ guy. That seemed totally out of character and a very ‘convenient’ plot device to explain why the heroine went with Gage whom I never warmed up to.

That book actually made me realize that I expect the people who are intro’d in the first couple of chapters to be the hero and heroine of the story. While this may not have been as much of a convention in earlier decades (I’ve been reading old Signets were the love triangles were really open until almost the end of the books), I firmly expect it now and was really annoyed at Kleypas for doing this to Hardy. I even knew he wasn’t the hero because I’d listened to the first 37 (good awfully narrated) minutes of Blue-eyed Devil and still the whole book (SD) felt wrong.

I’m sure there are folks who feel this was innovative genre bending… needless to say it didn’t work for me.

The ones in ‘regular’ romance where one party turns villain really don’t do jack for me and I’m feeling totally bad for the nice one left in the rain which is not what I read romance for. I want to be happy at the end!

As much as I dig menage, for regular romance, triangles aren’t my cup of tea.