Review: "Emmett" by L.C. Rosen

Emmett by L.C. Rosen
Published November 2023 via Little, Brown Books for Young Readers
★★★

It's been a good year for YA Austen retellings: Ghosted by Amanda Quain (Northhanger Abbey), Lola at Last by J.C. Peterson (Pride and Prejudice inspired), and now Emmett—which is, of course, an Emma retelling. Queer Emma! I'm here for it.

Emmett is blessed: he has the money, the looks, the grades, the friends. He tries to pay it forward by being nice—by volunteering and serving as his friends' sounding board and tutoring...or "tutoring". Ahem. (If some of this also benefits Emmett—increases his popularity, boosts his college applications, whatever—oh well! Nothing he can do about that.) Emmett doesn't want a boyfriend, not until he's 25 and his brain has stopped growing, but when his (*ahem*) tutoring client does want a boyfriend, well, Emmett is perfectly poised to do the nice thing and set him up with the perfect guy...whoever that might happen to be.

The book is appropriately tongue in cheek—think of Mr. Woodhouse and his obsession with eating thin gruel (itself a tongue-in-cheek characterisation—when Emma was written, gruel was purported to be healthy in any manner of situations, including when the eater had VD), and shift that to the 21st century and you get a man obsessed with green tea and cauliflower-crust pizza, and who tests his son's blood at every opportunity. Just in case. It's on point, though if anything I wanted Emmett to be a bit snarkier or a bit more...oblivious? Imagine him captioning his social media posts with #blessed, for example. He's more likeable for being a little more earnest and a little less over the top, but...I don't mind a little over-the-topness for Emma.

It may be time for me to go back and read the original, because it occurred to me at some point that I was thinking more of Clueless for context than of Emma. (I burn with shame.) In any case, nice to see another YA take that deviates from the more common retellings.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.