4 Star
Thirty-five-year-old Miranda is not an impulsive person. She’s been at Domestic Goddess magazine for eight years, she has great friends, and she’s finally moving on after a breakup. Having a baby isn’t even on her radar—until the day she discovers an abandoned newborn on the platform of a Brooklyn subway station. Rushing the little girl to the closest police station, Miranda hopes and prays she’ll be all right and that a loving family will step forward to take her.
Yet Miranda can’t seem to get the baby off her mind and keeps coming up with excuses to go check on her, until finally a family court judge asks whether she’d like to be the baby’s foster parent—maybe even adopt her. To her own surprise, Miranda jumps at the chance. But nothing could have prepared her for the ecstasy of new-mother love—or the heartbreak she faces when the baby’s father surfaces....
Kathryn - 4 Star
I finished reading You Were Meant For Me with mixed feelings. While the concept was great (both unusual and interesting) I had a hard time with the pace on occasion and some of the emotional connections throughout. There were so many good things about it though, that on the whole I enjoyed the book.
Miranda is still a bit of a mystery to me. Sometimes I felt as if she’d got everything in her life under control: the great position at work where she’s well respected, the adult way she’s handling her father’s dementia and the control she takes when she realises she’d like to foster (and possibly adopt) the baby she discovered. They all showed a woman who knows what she wants and how to go about getting it. My confusion lay with the personal relationships throughout the novel. She has an almost grade-school relationship with her friends which I couldn’t really fathom. I know that no one has everything sorted out but I still would have expected Miranda to have more than one friend (the actress) who had the maturity to help her when she needed it. They didn’t add much of anything to the story except frustration. However the older women (the nanny and the landlady) presented in the novel were both wonderful and I suppose were there to represent the mother figure for Miranda when her friends proved to be unhelpful.
I was almost ready to accept Miranda’s new life with baby Celeste and potential partner Evan when we were thrown the curve ball of baby’s biological father Jared turning up. I actually liked his character and his purpose to the plot (potential romantic interest aside) and despite him having some questionable personality traits I found myself understanding him. I think his intentions were good and the author was careful to let us know his relationship with his own mother had been a loving one and that he respected her greatly. I think his feelings regarding the baby’s mother were also genuine.
You Were Meant For Me was an interesting book and while I had some reservations about some of the secondary players I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the novel or pick up another by the same author.
Thank you to Penguin Random House for our review copy. All opinions are our own.
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