Review: One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Synopsis:
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.

Review:
Taylor Jenkins Reid has become one of my favorite authors. I LOVED her book “After I Do” so much that it made me want to read all her books. This is the second one I have read and I liked it, not loved. She writes a great love story that keeps you hooked until the end BUT this story didn’t feel very original.

Throughout the book I really had no idea who she would choose or who I wanted her to choose. About the same time she decided who she was choosing was about the same time I was deciding who I wanted her to choose. We picked the same person. I couldn’t imagine having to make that decision!

***SPOILER ALERT***

When I talked to my husband about the book he said it reminded him of the movie Castaway so, when I said I had never seen it, we made a movie night of it. Good movie, hated the ending, which is weird considering it is pretty much the same ending as the book. Maybe it had something to do with Tom Hanks being the “Jesse” and I just adore Tom Hanks. Or maybe it was seeing it play out, seeing all he went through to make it back to her, that made me think she should have left her “Sam” and gone back to Tom Hanks. Goes to show you not two situations are the exactly the same.

Favorite Quotes:
“I had predicated my life on the idea that I wanted to see everywhere extraordinary, but I’d come to realize that extraordinary is everywhere.”

“When you love someone, it seeps out of everything you do, it bleeds into everything you say, it becomes so ever-present, that eventually it becomes ordinary to hear, no matter how extraordinary it is to feel.”

“When you lose someone you love, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll ever feel better. That, one day, you’ll manage to be in a good mood simply because the weather is nice or the barista at the coffee shop on the corner remembered your order.
But it does happen.
If you’re patient and you work at it.”

“Just because something isn’t meant to last a lifetime doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant to be.”

“Do you ever get over loss? Or do you just find a box within yourself, big enough to hold it? Do you just stuff it in there, push it down, and snap the lid on it? Do you just work, every day, to keep the box shut? I thought that maybe if I shoved the pain in there hard enough and I kept the box shut tight enough that the pain would evaporate on its own, that I’d open the box one day to find it was empty and all of the pain I thought I’d been carrying with me was gone.”