If your significant other asked you for a pass to be sexually involved with one stranger a year for five years, would you do it? This question is explored in Hannah Sloane’s debut novel, The Freedom Clause. This comedic romantic lit fic follows Daphne and Dominic, a married couple in their mid-twenties, as they come to a crossroads in their relationship. As each other’s only sexual partner and significant other thus far, their romance is lacking…and so is their sex life. Dominic proposes a pact: for one night a year, they’re allowed to have a sexual experience with someone else, and they don’t need to discuss it with each other. The novel follows the pair as they navigate the openness of their marriage, their family dynamics, and finding themselves in their twenties.
Sloane does a phenomenal job with developing the main characters. Throughout the story, we see how the Freedom Clause affects Daphne and Dominic’s marriage, but we also see how it affects them as individuals. The character development is a marker to how good the book is, and it shows how focusing on who characters become by the end of the story can be done well without forgetting about the plot, and vice versa. Daphne breaks out of her shell and grows into a self-assured woman that I didn’t predict when beginning the book. Dominic, however, developed in reverse and becomes jealous and less confident, which I did see coming. Society teaches us that what a man wants would benefit us all, and we learn from Dominic’s failures that men’s selfishness is more of a detriment than a saving grace.
Ash gets his own paragraph. We meet Ash when Daphne waits at a bar for her sister, and he accidently gives her a free drink meant for another woman. From here, Ash joins the ride of the Freedom Clause — not sexually, since he’s gay — and he is Daphne’s biggest supporter. He’s also the best character in the story. Without Ash, we wouldn’t see Daphne grow into her own, nor would she push herself to try out the Freedom Clause. He’s a catalyst, and he keeps the story going with his banter and free spiritedness. I would read a sequel that follows Ash, with or without Daphne.
I have a few issues with the story, but they don’t take much away from the story and my enjoyment of it. The novel begins when Dominic and Daphne meet in college, and it doesn’t go much into their relationship prior to their marriage. As stated before, the pair never had a sexual experience with another person, and they didn’t date other people. With this information, I wanted to see a little more of their relationship dynamic and how they built it before we jumped to the future and the pact came into play. Also, the formatting of the “chapters” (or sections, really) made reading confusing at times. I had to reread some scenes because the point-of-view wasn’t clear until a couple of paragraphs in — the novel alternates between Daphne and Dominic’s perspective — and sometimes it seemed like it was in both character’s perspective at a time. Readers may find they have this same issue when they pick this book up, so paying close attention to the narrative is important.
Overall, Sloane’s debut is solid. The premise is fresh, and the outcome is far from cliché. Oftentimes, we see the man come out on top, and the woman suffers throughout the story because she doesn’t gain anything from what the man proposes. However, Sloane decides to say, “Look; the woman can win in these stories. The woman can have the most to gain, and the man has to sit back and watch in defeat due to his own selfishness.” And I like that.
