Britin Frazey

One of Book of the Month’s picks from back in February, One & Only was the debut to adult fiction by Maurene Goo, an established young adult novelist and experienced writer in multiple other fields.

I read this book in four days, and also gave this book four stars; although I was honestly on the fence about whether to give four and a half. Ultimately, my biggest reasons for limiting it to four come from the few slight problems that I found with pacing and with the narrating character, Cassia Park. To learn more, keep reading this review. There WILL be spoilers, but I will save those for the end, so if you don’t want any, you can stop reading there! If you want a brief overview of my thoughts, check out my recent post on my TikTok page.

This book falls into the contemporary romance genre, with essential aspects of magical realism. It was these fantastical elements that piqued my interest, specifically the idea that every person has one “fated” love, and that the Park family women have the ability to peek into a person’s past life and determine the name of this individual. Based on this ability, they founded a matchmaking company, called “One & Only,” which boasts a 100% success rate.

At the start of the story, Cassia has known the name of her fated partner, Daniel Nam, for a decade, but has been unable to track him down. She meets and starts up a casual relationship with 28-year-old Ellis the week she’s going to be turning 40— which is a pretty normal age gap, in my opinion, given that they meet when they’re both full grown adults. However, Cassia is going to have a lot of inner turmoil about it— especially after meeting Ellis’s 42-year-old boss, who happens to be named Daniel Nam-Watson, so buckle up.

The cover is gorgeous, in my opinion, and almost perfect. Given the love triangle nature of the story, it wouldn’t make sense to have a guy on it with her, as is a common cover choice for romances. However, I believe it would be made much better if my favorite character, Betty, was included. Betty is Cassia’s grumpy cockatoo, who she inherited from her mother, who died on Cassia’s eighth birthday (more on that later!). I think that Betty would go perfectly on one of Cassia’s shoulders, or soaring in the sky over the title. Personally, I’d even be pleased if she were featured soaring across the back cover— a space that is mostly empty blue, with a bit of the bush at the bottom, and a few yellow blossoms sprinkled throughout. The inclusion of a cockatoo would create more visual interest, as well as draw in other people. I know that I already read this book, but honestly, I would have wanted to start reading it way sooner if there had been a bird on it. Just saying.

My favorite human character was Marcella. She’s the funny, no-bullshit best friend that Cassia has had for years at the start of the novel. She runs her own restaurant chain. When the two of them met, Marcella was already married to her husband, Logan. Together, they have two children, Ozzie and Mica, who are both adorable. Outside of the Park family, Marcella is the only person who knows the full extent of the Park women’s magic and ability to see into past lives and find loves. One of my favorite attributes about Marcella is that she refuses to let Cassia look into her own past life, because she is happy with her husband and is uninterested in what other paths might haven been out there for her. She doesn’t care who she loved in a past life— she loves her husband in this one. In my opinion, this is how most people should treat the idea of fate or past lives, both within the novel and outside of it.

However, Cassia and the Park family treat the idea of finding one’s fated as the fact of life; the only way to be happy. This was proven when Cassia’s mom, Evette, died “alone” at a young age, having rejected the idea of finding her fated partner, and the family matchmaking business in general. Instead, she went to art school, and had Cassia with her college boyfriend, who left soon after the birth. Cassia’s grandmother, called Halmoni (Korean for “grandma”), uses this as a cautionary tale.

Halmoni’s number one priority has, for years, made finding Daniel Nam her top priority as she leads One & Only. As the family’s matriarch, she wants to ensure that the gift will continue to be passed down. Halmoni had two daughters, Evette and Sunny. Halmoni’s slightly younger sister, called Emoni (a combination of the Korean words for “grandmother” and “aunt” that Cassia coined at a young age). We’ve already discussed Evette’s life as far as needed for this review— but it’s important that Sunny didn’t want to have any kids, so she didn’t. Emoni, however, only had sons, so they don’t have the family gift. It’s unclear through the narrative if their daughters would be able to inherit the gift, but I don’t think so, because all the pressure is on Cassia to settle down and have at LEAST one daughter, so it doesn’t die out. This adds to the urgency of finding Daniel, but a decade of looking hasn’t created much hope.

Ever since she turned eight, Cassia has hated her birthday, given that was when Evette died. So, for as long as she’s been an adult, Cassia has taken a solo trip to wherever she wants to go— almost always unplanned.

After dropping Ellis off at his job, after a very intimate weekend, Cassia meets Daniel briefly, learning that he only recently started using the last name “Nam,” because he was adopted by a white family with the last name “Watson.” After his parents died, he reconnected with his birth mother, and started hyphenating the last name. So, that’s the reason the Park women couldn’t find him. Sure, I guess that works.

By this point in the book, readers are supposed to be pretty obsessed with Ellis, like Cassia is, and author Goo does a great job getting this to come across. So, having met Daniel, but still being in a situationship of sorts with Ellis, Cassia sets off on her birthday trip. A few hours after her arrival, Ellis, Daniel, and their entire landscape architecture firm show up at the same campsite. Perfect!

Cassia enjoys her time there with all the architects, especially her private moments with both Ellis and Daniel. I’m fuzzy on the details here, but at some point shortly after, or maybe during this trip, she ends things with Ellis, blaming the age gap. She then invites Daniel to One & Only’s upcoming matchmaking event, which quickly kicks off their relationship.

Despite this, Cassia never stops thinking about Ellis— even as she finds her interactions with Daniel fit into the vision she had for her life at age 40. This is my biggest issue with the character. She’s a full-time matchmaker, so love is her job, but she doesn’t seem to understand it, having only had “unserious” boyfriends in the past, while waiting for her fated. I think this aspect of her character makes sense— what bugs me about her is how incredibly ageist she is throughout the novel. She acts like 28-year-olds all spend their time partying each and every day. Cassia seems to hold a strangely strict belief that Ellis is too young to have any interest in getting married or having kids. At some point, she learns Ellis is divorced, yet she still maintains this belief, with that tidbit of information not challenging or solidifying her belief, which bothered me a little bit.

In my introduction, I also mentioned that I had a problem with the pacing of the novel. My biggest issue with this comes from the final line of the book jacket.

“As she battles between fate and chance, head and heart, a family secret is revealed that will make Cass question everything she’s ever known,” it reads.

That sounds great— people should always question “fate” and consider their choices. However, this secret is not revealed, or even hinted at, until over two-thirds of the way into the novel. While I think that this made sense within the story, it can’t be part of the premise if it happens so late, in my opinion. Revealing this secret would be a major spoiler, and given that it’s in the book jacket, I feel like this shouldn’t be the case. Maybe this is just a personal problem that I have, but I spent every moment before getting to this reveal wondering if I’d missed something.

One more complaint: this book is OBSESSED with Los Angeles, and as someone who’s never been there, I felt a little out of place at times. There was a good amount of description given, but I felt like there were things about the culture I was supposed to know and just didn’t. But this was a really minor thing.

Other than these grievances, I found this book a really enjoyable read. The characters all felt realistic to me, with flaws and relationships that I genuinely enjoyed reading. There’s a very large cast of characters, so some were more fleshed out than others, but I still found the larger interactions to feel well-rounded. This is especially impressive in the larger Park family, when the entire Park family, including Emoni’s sons and their spouses and children, and Marcella and her husband and kids, all get together, and it still feels like everyone has a distinct voice and unique attributes.

Another thing that’s cute about this story is that Cassia is named after Evette’s favorite plant, the yellow feathery cassia. But, since Evette died so young, she never got to tell her daughter why she chose the name. However, Ellis, a landscape architect and plant enthusiast, recognizes it in Cassia’s front yard during their first weekend together. Cassia mentions that her mother adored the plants, and Ellis tells her its name.

Okay, so I now have to discuss the secret, because outside of it being a problem for me pacing-wise that it’s foreshadowed on the book jacket, it also greatly changes the context of the novel for me. It reframes it from romance with some magical realism, to a full-fledged family drama with elements of romance and magical realism.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

Turn back now if you don’t want to know!

When the women do the readings, they use a piece of jade jewelry to sketch a name into their handmade paper. When the name goes down, it is written in white stitching, which turns to red once the two fated souls have connected in the present life. Even if one of the two people die before they can meet, the stitching remains white. These are the only two colors the thread can be, Cassia tells readers at the start.

Until Sunny comes over, knowing Cassia’s struggle between Ellis and Daniel, and shows her the piece of parchment that held the name of Evette’s fated partner. This name is stitched in black.

So, it turns out that Evette and Cassia’s dad, Matthew, actually were fated. While you may be annoyed that I lied earlier in my review, this was simply because that’s what the book itself did. Honestly, I liked this twist, though it made me angry at all of the other Park women. To me, it feels incredibly messed up to lie about something so important, especially when Evette wasn’t there to share her personal truth.

When Cassia learns this, she goes to Michigan to visit Matthew and get his side of the story. This was one of my favorite parts of the book, because it put the craziness of L.A. into perspective and introduced new characters that brought out a different side of Cassia. Matthew explains that the idea of fated partners is the Park family’s religion, but that it’s not required to be his or anyone else’s— not even if their magic stitches another person’s name into parchment. I loved this take, and it really grounded Cassia for the rest of the book. The character grew from learning this.

She returns to L.A. and officially breaks up with Daniel. Around that time, the office of One & Only catches fire— a development that didn’t have as much of an impact as it should have, in my opinion, but allowed for a sweeter ending. Cassia looks through the debris and finds the paper with Daniel’s name on it, seeing that the stitching is now black. She goes to Halmoni’s home, and they have a long and heart-wrenching conversation about everything. At the end of it, she goes straight to Ellis to confess her love and explain the mess she made of their original romance. She tells him all about her magic and the idea of fated matches, and he basically says that he’ll think about it.

Weeks pass while the office is being fixed. Cassia takes over One & Only, and finally begins to feel happy on her own, with the help of my two favorite characters, Marcella and Betty.

When she returns to the office, she finds yellow feathery cassia planted there, along with a statue of Betty, and knows Ellis was behind it. Turns out, he’s started his own landscape architecture company, and One & Only was his first customer! He and Cassia end up talking and getting back together, with Ellis believing her story and deciding to be with her, despite the mess she’d put him through over the last months. If I were Ellis, I would not forgive her, but as a reader, I was so happy that he did, because I was team Ellis from the start, and sadly, Daniel never made me question that take. I’m still sad that Cassia ruined the bromance they had, even if it was stated that Ellis and Daniel returned to decent terms.

There’s an epilogue of sorts where Cassia is pregnant with Ellis’s baby, and then a chapter that is written in the same style as all the times Cassia looked into others’ past lives, except that this time, she isn’t the one doing it— it’s an objective narrator. In this chapter, a soul from a time long ago— who is clearly Ellis— is in love with an older woman who’s already married to a rich man Ellis’s soul respects. Despite this, he can’t help himself finding her beautiful, and when her laundry gets caught and pulled down a river current, he fetches it for her, enjoying the small interaction.

For me, this raised a lot of questions about the magic and past lives system. I think it’s obvious that Cassia was compatible with both Daniel and Ellis, and could have had a happy story no matter who she’d fallen for or chosen, but this makes me question if the family’s magic system is meant to be taken as it was presented through the novel, or if readers are meant to take away that there are multiple souls they could be fated to, within the world and magic. I think it implies there are multiple past lives, and a person can connect in this one to any of those souls, or even a new one— but there isn’t much to imply that within the narrative. And if this is the case, how do the Park women know whether they’ve found the right one for this life? If their business is committed to there being a “One & Only,” how do they know they haven’t found a different person than will be the only?

This is to say, I want a sequel, where Cassia’s young daughter grapples with all of these questions, and perhaps changes the family business for the better alongside her mother. I don’t think this will happen, this book seems to be a standalone, but it would make me really happy! And I’ll definitely be reading more of Maurene Goo’s work in the future.