Editors Reads Verdict
One True Loves is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her most emotionally daring, posing a romantic dilemma with no clean solution and refusing to judge any of the characters for the choices they make. The premise is melodramatic but the execution is genuinely compassionate.
What We Loved
- The central dilemma is genuinely impossible to resolve cleanly, and Reid respects that
- Both love interests are written with equal care — there is no obvious 'right' choice
- Emma's grief and rebuilding are rendered with emotional authenticity
- Reid avoids the easy narrative shortcuts that lesser novels would take
Minor Drawbacks
- The setup requires significant suspension of disbelief around circumstances
- Emma's voice can feel passive during key decision moments
- Secondary characters in the small hometown feel somewhat schematic
Key Takeaways
- → Love can be real and genuine in multiple forms without one form negating the other
- → Grief has its own timeline and does not follow social expectations
- → Rebuilding a life after loss requires making choices that involve loss in themselves
- → The person you were before tragedy and the person you became after it are both genuinely you
- → Honesty with all involved parties, including oneself, is the only ethical path through impossible situations
| Author | Taylor Jenkins Reid |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Washington Square Press |
| Pages | 368 |
| Published | June 7, 2016 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Contemporary Fiction, Romance, Women's Fiction |
| Difficulty | Beginner |
| Best For | Romance readers who appreciate emotional complexity and genuine moral ambiguity; anyone drawn to love stories that refuse easy resolution. |
An Impossible Situation, Handled Honestly
Before Taylor Jenkins Reid became the author of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six, she was writing emotionally ambitious contemporary romance that asked harder questions than the genre typically permits. One True Loves is the clearest example of this: a novel built around a situation so inherently impossible that any resolution will involve loss, and the author’s determination to let all three of its central figures be comprehensible and worthy of sympathy.
Emma Blair married Jesse at twenty-three, and they spent their early years traveling the world together. Then Jesse was lost in a helicopter accident while on assignment, presumed dead. Emma returned to her Massachusetts hometown, rebuilt her life slowly, fell in love with her childhood friend Sam, and became engaged. And then Jesse was found — alive, on a remote island — and the structure she had constructed on top of her grief suddenly requires complete reassessment.
Two Men, No Villain
The novel’s decisive formal choice is to make both Jesse and Sam fully realized characters with genuine claims on Emma’s love and loyalty. Jesse is not diminished by absence, nor is he turned into an obstacle. Sam is not merely a placeholder whom Emma will obviously leave for her great love. Both relationships are depicted as real, and the choice Emma must ultimately make is real in its consequences.
Reid is interested in the question of whether love can be simultaneously unique and multiple — whether the love we have for different people at different points of our lives can all be authentic without any of them being lesser.
The Emotional Architecture of Grief
Emma’s gradual reconstruction of her life after Jesse’s disappearance is handled with attention to the specific textures of grief: the way it changes over time, the guilt of eventually feeling better, the strange double consciousness of loving someone new while continuing to love someone lost. This emotional honesty elevates what might otherwise be a melodramatic premise into something closer to genuine investigation.
The resolution, when it comes, is not entirely satisfying — partly by design. Reid doesn’t believe the situation can be fully resolved, and she lets that show.
Our rating: 4.0/5 — A brave, compassionate romance that poses a genuinely impossible dilemma and has the integrity to resist the easy answers.
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