Emmett Woodhouse, handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence and had lived nearly eighteen years in the world with very little to distress or vex him.
 
Emmett knows he’s blessed. And because of that, he tries to give back: from charity work to letting the often irritating Georgia sit at his table at lunch, he knows it’s important to be nice. And recently, he’s found a new way of giving back: matchmaking. He set up his best friend Taylor with her new boyfriend and it’s gone perfectly. So when his occasional friend-with-benefits Harrison starts saying he wants a boyfriend (something Emmett definitely does NOT want to be), he decides to try and find Harrison the perfect man at Highbury Academy. 
 
Emmett’s childhood friend, Miles, thinks finding a boyfriend for a guy you sleep with is a bad idea. But Miles is straight, and Emmett says this is gay life – your friends, your lovers, your boyfriends – they all come from the same very small pool. That’s why Emmett doesn’t date – to keep things clean. He knows the human brain isn’t done developing until twenty-five, so any relationship he enters into before then would inevitably end in a breakup, in loss. And he’s seen what loss can do. His mother died four years ago and his Dad hasn’t been the same since. 
 
But the lines Emmett tries to draw are more porous than he thinks, and as he tries to find Harrison the perfect match, he learns that gifted as he may be, maybe he has no idea what he’s doing when it comes to love. 

What a perfect way to begin the month of love than with a wonderful retelling of Austen’s Emma. I mean it, this is a great retelling. It perfectly captures the lovable meddling of Emmett Woodhouse. A boy with good intentions and clumsy execution.

From the beginning, Emmett is aware he is blessed and chooses to not to just luxuriate in his many blessings (a wealthy family, quality fashions, happy parent), but share them. Basically, he wants his friends to be happy, and he wants to be nice.

However, nice is different than good so even though Emmett does good deeds, sometimes it is more for the sake of his own reputation as nice like allowing the annoying Georgia to sit at his lunch table even though privately he can’t stand her. Little bits of hypocrisies that he won’t admit because he can’t stand the idea of not being perfectly nice person others think he is.

The only one who seems to see through him is Miles who Emmett feels is a condescending prick that judges him for an event that he can’t quite remember.

Miles is the Knightly of the piece as one can guess. The person that Emmett greatly respects and admires but also feels small and judged, unaware that he wants more than Miles’ respect but his true admiration and love.

It doesn’t help that Emmett has a theory that no relationship before the age of 25 is worth it. 25 is when the brain stops growing and when one truly knows themself, so he figures any high school relationship is doomed to end and thus will not have any. That way he’ll never experience heartbreak.

The logic sounds a little off, but that’s because Rosen gets a little deeper into how the death of Emmett’s mother and his father’s resulting anxiety and hypchondria affects Emmett’s view on love.

He insists he doesn’t want a relationship, but he does. He does want love. Just the tidy person Emmett is, is scared of the messiness of heartbreak. He fears it’ll be the same sort of grief as his mother’s death, and that he’ll react like his father, completely fall apart. Is such pain truly worth it?

It adds such a delicious layer to Emmett’s psyche and how he interacts with the world, that all his meddling is not only from wanting to do good but also a sense of control.

Rosen also adds more depth to Emmett’s friend, Taylor. In the original novel, Taylor is Emma’s beloved governess who gets married aka Emma’s first “success” in matchmaking. Here, she’s reimagined as Emmett’s best friend, also his first success in matchmaking, and having Taylor aged down to a friend allows for some reality check and a person for Emmett to discuss his feelings about love, family, and his attempts at matchmaking.

Other characters like Harrison, Clarke, Robert, Georgia and so on are great parallels to the originals. The one nitpick I have is that this version of Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax aka Andre West and John, get the short stick and are not important to Emmett as in the original. I suppose it’s for the best as it allows the focus to narrow down to Emmett, I just liked Frank in the origial and I wonder what would have happened if Emmett developed feelings for this Andre version.

I should also mention that even though Miles is Emmett’s Knightly, there is another character named Knight who seems to take on Knight’s role as advisor. So Knightly split in half? I think it was Rosen’s way of having Knightly be an advisor to Emmett in a more realistic setting since Miles, being a teenager secretly in love with Emmett cannot have that mature conversation, but this is contemporary and having Knightly be a man who’s seen Emmett grow up (like Knightly saw Emma grow up) just would not work.

Far more imporant, the romance between Emmett and Miles is what sells the book as Emmett begins to have a shift in perspective. Not only in how he perceives love, and what makes a good match. But that Miles’ belief that Emmett can be better is not condescension but belief in Emmett, and the continuing evolution of people. People, love, family, everything evolves. We can only work to evolve for the better and that’s what makes the potential messiness worth it.

It’s all so delightful and Rosen adds to the atmosphere with the inclusion of the Woodhouse garden and what it means for Emmett and his dad, the private school symphony that plays in the background, and the running gag of flower petels, snowflakes and the like swirling around couples in love. It creates a whimsical callback to the regency staples of walks in the gardens and ballroom music, blending the past and the present for a wonderful romance.

5 falling rose petels.