Review Detail

‘Meant To Be’ by Jo Knowles captures the insecurities of being a kid who just wants to do the right thing, but somehow keeps messing up and feeling guilty that things aren’t turning out quite right. While it’s never easy to be a pre-teen, teenager, or even an adult, Ivy can’t seem to make anyone understand why she’s so content living in Applewood Heights with her family. After all, they had to leave their house and move into a small apartment where nothing is the same as it once was. Her sister and parents are dealing with the move, but they want to get back to something more normal. The problem is that Ivy has made friends in the building, and she has no desire to go back to the life she once led where friends weren’t quite so easy to come by.

Ivy has found ways to adapt to her new life, including helping out by fixing things around the apartment building with the building’s maintenance person, Donnalyn, and watching baking shows with her new friends, Alice and Lucas. They love plotting out how they will bake their own fantastic creations, and their family members often enjoy helping out.

The trouble starts when Alice is upset about her mother, Stevie, not coming home. Even though she lives with her grandmother and enjoys spending time with her friends, Alice is not happy that her mother doesn’t seem to want to come and be with her. Ivy tries to cheer her up, but in so doing, she makes things worse. Alice doesn’t want to hear about how great it is that they can still be together. She only wants to know that others care about her distress over her mother. Despite Ivy’s desperate attempts to help, she finds that sometimes saying the right thing is a harder task than it might seem. While she upsets the apple cart little by little, it helps her find her own way of helping that is conducive to everyone else’s desires as well. She learns that just because something seems right doesn’t mean it is the right course of action for the person she is trying to help, and that is the biggest lesson of all—knowing how to meet someone where they are, with what they need in a given moment.

A sweet and inspiring story about learning about boundaries, truth, and unconditional love, ‘Meant To Be’ captures the essence of what it means to be someone who works to do what is right even when everything seems to be going wrong.