Evening Everyone,

Two back to back posts, I am on fire! I joke, I did a long car journey yesterday so I had the opportunity to get a huge chunk of an audiobook listened to. Other than that literally nothing has happened today aside from working. I haven’t had much book time, but I’m hoping that the rest of the evening will be very different.

Book 📖

I have wanted to delve deeper into the back catalogue of @tjenkinsreid for quite some time. I’ve read the big, well known ones but I wanted to also give the lesser raved about books a try and so I started here with One True Loves.

Description 🔖

Emma Blair married her childhood sweetheart Jesse when she was in her twenties and they started their life together intending to live it to the max. They travelled the world, together and separately and treated every moment as an adventure. On their first wedding anniversary, Jesse is on a helicopter that never returns and is never found. Just like that, he’s gone forever.

In a state of despair, Emma moves back to her home town to be near her family and to try and rebuild something of her life. She never expected to bump into her old friend Sam and she certainly didn’t expect to find herself falling in love with him. When they get engaged Emma is certain that this is her second chance at happily ever after.

Until Jesse is found. He’s been alive all of these years, waiting to be rescued and trying to find his way back home to Emma who now finds herself in the peculiar position of having both a husband and fiancé. Now she has to decide which man is her one true love.

General Thoughts 🤔

Before I start, I’d just like to take a moment to appreciate the cover of this book. The colours are so pretty and so gorgeous, every time I see it it makes me feel happy. The actual book made me feel happy too. Not that the whole thing was happy, there were some awkward and really sad moments that had me covering my face with my hands. I can’t even begin to imagine what it would be like for anyone to find themselves in a situation similar to Emma, Sam and Jesse and I don’t think that I could hand on heart say that I would have reacted any differently to events than they did.

Characters 👫👭👬

Emma – My heart broke for this poor woman. Firstly, her entire world fell apart when she lost Jesse and it took a lot for her to pull herself back together again. Then, just when she thought she was getting her second chance, bomb drops and everything is up in the air again. I think that Emma was respectful of both Sam and Jesse’s feelings and I don’t think there would have been a pleasant solution for everyone involved; she chose the least unpleasant path.

Jesse – I don’t think I really grew to love Jesse very much. I appreciated all that he had been through and how that would screw someone up psychologically, but I think he was a bit of a douche. I got the impression that he expected to come home to find everything as he had left it and then threw his dummy out the pram when that wasn’t true.

Sam – I would like to order myself a Sam. He was so sweet and so patient to the point where he sacrificed his own feelings for others. He was obviously head over heels for Emma and had loved her since they were young. He had let her go once, it was killing me to see him let her go for a second time.

Writing Style ✍️

I think that this book had a slightly different tone to the other TJR books that I have read. The others had this really special feel to them almost like a biography or a documentary whereas I didn’t get that same feeling from One True Loves. It was gorgeously written for sure and it made me feel emotional and I was drawn into the lives of the characters, but there was a bit of shine missing from it. Maybe this is as a result of me going backwards through TJR’s work and she had found her groove with her last few books.

I listened to the audio book and I had absolutely no complaints about the narration. It was read in a way that was engaging without being annoying and I definitely didn’t think that any of it was “over-read”.

Conclusion & Scoring 🎖

On my little journey backwards through TJR’s work, I am glad that One True Loves was the book I chose to read. It was a beautiful story about love, heart break and a woman rebuilding herself after devastation. I went the whole way through this book rooting for Emma to make a particular choice and I am so happy that she followed her heart and realised who was the true love for her. I really liked this romantic drama and I’d definitely recommend the audio book for some lovely listening.

😍😍😍😍😩