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.” 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.