Meant To Be

Rating:
Summary: engaging romantic with some suspense
Review: Just north of Pittsburgh, thirty year old schoolteacher Meara O'Rourke receives a phone call from a Laurel Mountain hospital stating that her mom was near death from a car accident. Meara informs the caller that her mom died a month ago after suffering from a long term illness. When the hospital administrator mentions Sheila Black, Meara realizes that the woman in the trauma center is her biological mother, whom she met once.

She arrives at the hospital where her mother warns her that Rosemary died before Sheila also passes away. Attorney David Falcon informs Meara that Sheila was married to Mitchell Black who died in the crash and that Rosemary was Mitchell's deceased first wife. She also learns that she inherited part ownership of an estate including the nineteenth century Sheepsworth Inn. Mitchell's angry son Fletcher displays hostility towards Meara. He wants her to leave and will buy her out. Instead a stubborn Meara who does not want any part of the estate refuses to sell because she believes he plans to destroy this pristine land. Meara learns more about her biological mother and Mitchell to the point that she loves him, but he remains nasty towards her, making her wonder if its time to leave while her heart still beats.

This is an engaging romantic with some suspense that occurs late in the novel. For the most part, the tale is more of a character study as Meara tries to understand her mother and Fletcher, which in turn enables the audience to better understand the lead female protagonist. Fans will appreciate this insightful tale though the intrigue comes towards the second half.

Harriet Klausner

Rating:
Summary: Meant to be missed.
Review: Meara O'Rourke is surprised when after only having met the woman once years ago, she's suddenly summoned to her birth mother's bedside. Sheila Black tries to tell her long-lost daughter something important, but doesn't get it out before she passes away. It turns out Sheila had recently married a man who died instantly in the car wreck that eventually claimed Sheila's life and that half of this man's estate now belongs to Meara as Sheila's only heir.

"Meant To Be" reads more like a chick lit with a beefed up suspense angle than it does a traditional romance. Mostly because of Meara's first person narrative and the chick lit prerequisite "life changes" she's implemented just prior to the story beginning (complete with a new list of rules to live her life by). From the beginning when the birth mother's final words of mystery trailed off with her dying breath I knew that I was in for a fairly unoriginal "girl discovers herself and love along the way" type story. Not that those can't be good if done well, but that isn't the case here.

Meara just isn't a very likable heroine for me. She's been unlucky in love, but instead of truly deciding that she's the problem (as a list of new rules would imply), all of her boyfriends are conveniently at fault for the problems in her past relationships. Meara's birth mother Sheila was only married to her husband Mitchell for a few days before they both died and Mitchell didn't have time to amend his will to protect the interests of his two children. His property, a large area of timbered Pennsylvania wilderness with an inn and an old house, had in fact belonged to his children's recently deceased mother. Instead of instantly relinquishing legal rights to this property, as would have been the moral thing, Meara instead drags her feet. Later, on an environmental crusade that serves only as a rant for the author, she decides she's keeping the half of Mitchell's property because she hears there's a new development coming in the area and decides she needs to "protect" it.

Meara's romantic interest in the story is Fletcher Black, Mitchell's son. We never get inside Fletcher's head, with the novel being written in the first person, but he just seems like a stock contemporary hero who's been burned in love and therefore swears off all women FOREVER. His cosmopolitan ex-love interest is conveniently evil and slutty while Meara, the wholesome pie-baking nature-lover, happily plays her antithesis. He's a wood carver who loves the forest he grew up in and only wants to live in an isolated cabin there instead of in San Francisco where he's been living and working for several years. Fletcher seems to be attracted to Meara because her interests match up so neatly with his own, but I just don't feel any real chemistry between them. He has some pretty good reasons to be leery of her considering the way she mucks up the dispersal of his father's estate and I can't really see what she does to endear herself to him to begin with.

All in all, I just didn't enjoy this book at all. The writing was fine, but the story and the characterization were poor. The suspense isn't really that suspenseful, and to my mind isn't really resolved as we never know who Meara's birth father is. The villain is conveniently one dimensionally evil without having any deep motivations. I give "Meant To Be" one star. It isn't much of a romance, isn't much of a suspense, and isn't much of a chick lit novel. I've never read Edie Claire before and don't think I will again.