A long weekend with a novel about loving more than once

For the evening when the house is in order, the kettle is warm and the garden is done for the day, this novel offers a story with real feeling in it. It follows one woman who has loved and lost, then loved again, and now faces a choice she never expected to make. It is a book to settle into, unhurried and warm.

One True Loves is a novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, published by Atria Books in June 2016. The edition described here is a 352 page paperback in English. It begins with Emma Blair, who in her twenties marries her high school sweetheart, Jesse. The two leave behind the expectations of their parents and their Massachusetts hometown and build a life around travel and seizing chances. On their first wedding anniversary, Jesse is aboard a helicopter over the Pacific when it goes missing, and Emma is left to put herself back together.

Years later, in her thirties, Emma has moved home and given up her old job. She runs into an old friend, Sam, and slowly finds herself in love again. They become engaged, and it feels like a second chance at happiness. Then Jesse is found alive, having spent all that time trying to get home to her. That is where the publisher’s description stops, and this note stops there too. The question the book puts to its heroine is the one in its title: who is her one true love, and what does it mean to love truly.

The reviews point to a book built on feeling and character more than on clever machinery. The Associated Press praises Reid for creating characters you believe in, and Real Simple says you may struggle to root for one man over the other. BookRiot describes being as ambivalent as Emma for a time, and finds some deep truths in the story. One reviewer at Examiner.com notes that the first person narrative rings true. The themes are grief, loyalty, the pull of an earlier self and the right to begin again, handled through one woman’s inner life rather than through a crowd of events.

This suits a reader who wants a love story with real stakes and is comfortable with a question that has no tidy answer. It may reach someone who has lived through a loss, a second beginning or a long marriage, and who likes to hold those experiences up against a story. It is less likely to suit a reader looking for light comedy, since the premise is emotional from the start. That is a judgment drawn from the description and the reviews, not a measurement.

As a read, it is a mid length novel told in a single voice, well matched to a long weekend or a week of quiet evenings. Sunset Magazine calls it “dripping with drama and tension,” and Booklist calls it gut wrenching yet upbeat, a sure bet for readers of romantic women’s fiction. What stays with a reader afterward is likely to be less the question of who Emma should choose than the question of what a person owes her own past. Whether that is the right book for this season is partly taste, and the setup alone will tell you quickly.