Meant To Be (Zoraida Cordova) Books in Order

Zoraida Cordova's Meant to Be entry is Kiss the Girl, a modern retelling that borrows the emotional shape of The Little Mermaid without turning into fantasy. Instead of undersea kingdoms and sea witches, the story moves through pop stardom, music industry pressure, and the strange loneliness of being famous before you have figured out who you are away from the spotlight.

The heroine is Ariel del Mar, one of the stars of Siren Seven, a world-famous band made up of Ariel and her sisters. From the outside, her life looks perfect. She performs to huge crowds, has a carefully managed public image, and stands right at the point where one big career chapter could turn into another. But that is also the problem. The people around her already know what comes next, and Ariel is not sure she wants the future they have planned.

Her father, who runs Atlantica Records, expects her to slide straight from the group's farewell tour into a solo career. Ariel, meanwhile, wants one summer that feels like an actual life and not a product rollout. That wish pushes the plot into motion when she sneaks out for a night in Brooklyn and meets Eric Reyes, the lead singer of an up-and-coming band. He does not know who she really is at first, and that gap between public identity and private self becomes the book's central tension.

The big question is not whether Ariel can sing. It is whether she gets to choose the life built around that voice.

From there, the story opens into a road-trip style romance. Ariel joins Eric and his band for the summer, stepping into a world that feels freer, scrappier, and more honest than the one she came from. The appeal of the book is less about high-concept plotting and more about what happens when a person who has always been watched gets to experiment with being ordinary, at least for a little while. Music, travel, attraction, and secrecy all keep that tension moving.

Because this is part of the wider Meant to Be collection, it also works as a standalone. You do not need a long series commitment to read it. The page matters more for context, tone, and fit. Cordova brings a breezy, contemporary feel, but she keeps the emotional stakes grounded in family expectation, creative ambition, and the very real fear that choosing yourself might disappoint the people who helped build your whole world.

So if you are browsing this page, expect a YA romance first, and a retelling second. Kiss the Girl keeps the spirit of longing, voice, and self-definition from its fairy-tale roots, but places all of that inside a modern music scene where finding your own rhythm can feel just as risky as jumping into the sea.