Review: Meant to Be by Lauren Morril

Title: Meant to Be
Author: Lauren Morril
Published November 13th 2012 by Delacorte Books for Young Readers
Contemporary YA
Goodreads | Amazon
_____________________________________


I actually wrote this review back on August '12, in the back of one of my surgery notes, so it's old haha:

It took me a while to get into Meant to Be, mainly because I couldn’t connect with the narrator.

Julia is the nerd extraordinaire. She was kind of annoying, actually. I mean I’m sure she meant no harm but she was annoying, trying to be the best one in her class, pretending nobody was worth talking to, and despising anyone who was having fun on the school trip to London.

And no one was having more fun than Jason, class clown and hottie extraordinaire. Jason was all about making inappropriate (but hilarious) comments, being sassy and everyone (except Julia: see above) loves him.

So the thing is, Julia and Jason get assigned as partners for the trip and it leads to a lot of awkward situations that would have been funny if Julia wasn’t so uptight and annoying. Anyway, one of those situations was when Julia got drunk in a party that Jason took her to, and she pretends to be a supermodel (even though she is 5 ft. tall and has a stocky, muscular body which made me go all WHAT?! How can someone buy such a lie?!) and now she keeps receiving texts from a mysterious Chris that seems to like her a lot and because she is so clueless about love, she enlists the help of Jason to make her international affair happen.

Dude. From scene 1 you can tell Jason is into Julia, question is: WHY? She’s got on my wrong side because she didn’t even give a chance to anything remotely different to what she knows! Even when she’s in friggin’ London! The only thing about her that I liked was that she could laugh at herself, like that time she called herself a she-hulk (hahahaha).

And I think I would have liked the story more if I wasn’t so confused about some things that didn’t make sense and were also awfully convenient…

SPOILERS AHEAD

-Julia stated that the hotel was only for her class and was closed to the public (like, when does that even happen?) yet her crush and his dad managed to stay there because they knew the owner (right) I mean they’re rich but the chose to stay in a hotel that wasn’t even finished and was closed to the public and not one of London’s posh hotels.

-Jason had Julia’s phone all along and she didn’t know. She thought she had her phone but… wouldn’t she have noticed that the numbers she had previously saved to the phone (like her friend’s) weren’t there anymore? Wouldn’t she have thought that weird?

SPOILERS ARE OVER.

I read an ARC though, so these might have been changed.

Things I liked: Jason’s family story, descriptions of the city, a certain scene with a certain red-headed dude singing a certain favorite song of mine from a very famous band from Liverpool.