Review: Meant to be Mine by Becky Wade

An Interesting Premise

When Celia meets her high school crush, Ty Porter, during a weekend in Las Vegas, she never dreams it will turn into a romance—or a marriage. Her dreams come crashing down when Ty reveals he has a girlfriend, and Celia vows she’ll hate him forever.

Five years later, Celia has put aside her dreams of owning a pastry shop and café in favour of the need to earn a steady wage and provide for her daughter. She’s never told Ty about Addie, and she has no intention of doing so. But that’s difficult when he shows up out of the blue in her Oregon home town.

Meant to Be Mine was a well-written story with an interesting plot and a solid faith thread, but it was let down by the main characters. I was never fully convinced by the romance. To put it bluntly, the relationship between Ty and Celia seemed to be based on mutual lust rather than mutual faith or mutual friendship (although I did enjoy their verbal sparring).

Celia spends most of the novel hating Ty—or pretending she does—while Ty is pining for the woman who dumped him after that Vegas weekend. They had too many reasons not to be together for my taste, and that’s difficult to get past in a romance novel. I see them being happy for now, but I'm not convinced it's happy ever after. The Other Woman trope didn’t help. I know some people loathe the Secret Baby plot, but that's not my problem. I don’t like the Other Woman plot.

Meant to Be Mine is a sequel to Undeniably Yours (in that Ty is the brother of Bo Porter, hero in the first novel), but works well as a standalone story. There was more of a faith element in Meant to Be Mine than in Undeniably Yours, but I enjoyed Bo and Meg’s story more. I’ll probably want to read the next in the series, because that’s probably going to be about Jake, who strikes me as a character worth knowing more about …

Thanks to Bethany House and NetGalley for providing a free book for review. You can find out more about Becky Wade at her website.