One and Only

Maurene Goo landed on my radar last year for the first time, and her YA homage to Back to the Future, Throwback, was among my favorite books of the year. In that book, a 17-year-old Korean-American girl is transported back to 1995 to try to help her mother—a high school senior in 1995—become homecoming queen. It was sweet, it was funny, it was touching, and its finishing position at #5 on my Best of 2025 might have been too low. I really loved it.

With One and Only, Goo is back with her first novel for adults. The premise centers around main character Cassia Park, who is on the cusp of her fortieth birthday and still single. Her father left when she was a toddler, and her mother tragically died when she was eight, and so Cassia has been raised by her aunt (Sunny), her great aunt (Emoni), and her grandmother (Halmoni). The elder Park women run a matchmaking company that shares a name with the book, and Cassia is part of the family business. They boast a "100% success rate for true love. Guaranteed." because, as Cassia tells us, "it's true—everyone we match stays together." You see, the Park women, have an ace up their sleeves: "Every woman in my family is born with the same gift I have—inexplicable yet reliable: the ability to see past lives and past loves." Through a "face reading", they can see the past and an invisible thread connecting a person to their "fated". They are able to determine the name of the person's fated, and they conspire to place the two people together at one of their matchmaking events.

Cassia has seen the success of this countless times, and as she says, "Everything...everything I believe about life and love is based on fated matches." The Park women have, naturally, done a reading on Cassia, and revealed to her the name of her fated: Daniel Nam. However, after ten years of searching, she has not been able to find him. With her fortieth birthday approaching, her biological clock is ticking, and the stress of not finding Daniel has her worried. To compound the pressure, there are no other female heirs in the Park family, If Cassia doesn't birth a daughter, the family business will end with her as well.

After Cassia has a minor bike accident and a twenty-eight-year-old man named Ellis comes to her aid, she drunkenly decides to invite him over one Friday night. They end up forming a significant connection, but Cassia knows it can't be true love, because of course she is fated to be with Daniel Nam. After a weekend spent mostly in the bedroom, Cassia drops Ellis off at work, where she is introduced to his boss...none other than Daniel Nam.

The book progresses with a series of overly convenient run-ins, where Cassia is forced to choose between her prophesied destiny with Daniel and an undeniable pull towards Ellis, creating an especially awkward love triangle given the close mentoring relationship between Daniel and Ellis. "Who is the person to best navigate the chaos of life with? Do I want a relationship that feels like a slow, steady burn—one full of shared passions and big plans? Or do I want one that feels electric and unexpected—digging my bare hands into the dirt and accepting life's surprises?" Both men have few flaws, and so there's no clear right choice for Cassia.

There is significant overlap in the themes explored in One and Only and Throwback. Cassia may be nearly forty, but her voice and patterns of speech closely resemble Samantha Kang's from Throwback and the teens that Goo has been writing up to this point. Once again, Goo explores mother-daughter relationships as well as the importance of extended family, especially in Korean households. Our main character in both novels needs to work through her own deep-seated family issues in order to realize her full potential. Aside from a slight uptick in spice (from a zero in Throwback to a 1-out-of-5, at most, in One and Only) and the absence of time travel, there are plenty of similarities between the two books, which for me was purely positive. As mentioned, I loved Throwback, and while that book was a touch more magical for me, there were plenty of elements in One and Only that had me equally emotionally invested in the characters and outcome. If you liked Throwback, you'll almost certainly like this latest offering as well; it's another winner from Maurene Goo.