One True Loves

One True Loves is a novel penned by Reid. The American author is best known for her novels The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (2017) and Daisy Jones and The Six (2019), two of the “famous women quartet,” which also includes Malibu Rising (2021). These novels, and the others in the quartet, all feature a female protagonist struggling with balancing a glamorous life in the public eye and private pressures. However, the four novels Reid wrote and published before the quartet are all romances. Between them, the novels explore the idea of soulmates, losing a lover, grieving and healing, and moving on and starting over.

One True Loves is Reid’s fourth book, a romance which features all of these ideas. It also employs familiar tropes of the genre: high school romance, unrequited love, second chance romance, and a love triangle. In order to set up the novel’s love triangle, the first three tropes are employed twice in the novel. There are hints of attraction between Emma and Sam in high school, but it is Emma and Jesse who eventually end up dating. Emma’s feelings for Jesse are initially unrequited, just as Sam’s feelings for Emma remain so. When Emma and Sam reconnect years after Jesse’s disappearance, it is a second chance at love in more ways than one—for Emma, this meeting is a second chance at love after Jesse; for Sam, it is a second chance at a relationship with the girl he loved in high school. However, another second chance at love is presented when Jesse reemerges just two months after Emma and Sam get engaged: For both Emma and Jesse, this is a second chance at a life with each other.

Jesse’s return is, in itself, another trope: a lover seemingly returning from the dead. It further throws Emma into her love triangle, the romance trope that dominates the second half of the novel. Emma has feelings for both Jesse and Sam; however, as her sister Marie points out, the question is less about who she loves more, and rather about the person she is in either relationship. The events that unfold as Emma is forced to confront the situation explore ideas of soulmates and a single true love, thus lending the novel its title. However, these events also examine how people grow and change over time, and what it means to grow out of a relationship. In this regard, the tropes and themes of the novel are interconnected: the tropes set up the themes, while the themes subvert the tropes (by having the characters examine their emotions and needs in a mature way). The idea of soulmates and a single, everlasting love is examined and dismantled through Emma’s conflict, and the way she navigates it. This is further done by incorporating the theme of Growth and Change as Individuals and within Relationships which helps to ensure a “Happily Ever After” for all the characters involved—yet another trademark of the romance genre.