Review: One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid

One True Loves

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Publisher: Washington Square Press

Pages: 352

Format: ARC

Buy the Book: Amazon

Goodreads:  In her twenties, Emma Blair marries her high school sweetheart, Jesse. They build a life for themselves, far away from the expectations of their parents and the people of their hometown in Massachusetts. They travel the world together, living life to the fullest and seizing every opportunity for adventure.

On their first wedding anniversary, Jesse is on a helicopter over the Pacific when it goes missing. Just like that, Jesse is gone forever.

Emma quits her job and moves home in an effort to put her life back together. Years later, now in her thirties, Emma runs into an old friend, Sam, and finds herself falling in love again. When Emma and Sam get engaged, it feels like Emma’s second chance at happiness.

That is, until Jesse is found. He’s alive, and he’s been trying all these years to come home to her. With a husband and a fiancé, Emma has to now figure out who she is and what she wants, while trying to protect the ones she loves.

Who is her one true love? What does it mean to love truly?

Emma knows she has to listen to her heart. She’s just not sure what it’s saying.


Kritters Thoughts:  Does each person only have one soul mate?  Can you have more than one true love in your life?  These are maybe a few questions that people ask often and this book tackles these questions with an interesting twist.  Emma Blair met two boys while in high school and ended up going away to college and marrying one and losing contact with the other.  After a turn of events, the one she marries goes missing and in her devastation she returns home and possibly reconnects with the other.  What happens if the original true love comes back?

I love this concept of maybe each person has more than one potential shot at true love.  I am happily married, but wonder if I had taken a different road would I have ended up happily married just to someone else?  Were small decisions that I made sent me down this path that resulted in happiness, but if I had made a small turn would I have still ended up happy just somewhere else?  I love when fiction can make you think a little without completely hitting you in the gut.  

I also love how Taylor Jenkins Reid tackles topics with characters that seem so real that you wish you could be friends with them!  I loved Emma Blair and thought she was so real and her character arc felt honest.  In the editor letter in the beginning of my ARC I read she was on a team and I have to admit I was #TeamSam the entire book.  Call me a rational non adventure kind of lady, but Sam was my guy from the start!  

An added bonus in a book is a bookstore, so to have the Blair family own a generational bookstore may have put this book over the top for me!  What reader doesn't love a story with a bookstore in it!  

I will read any Taylor Jenkins Reid book without even having a synopsis or title!  


Rating:  absolutely loved it and want a sequel

Disclosure of Material Connection:  I received one copy of this book free of charge from Atria Books.  I was not required to write a positive review in exchange for receipt of the book; rather, the opinions expressed in this review are my own.