After reading The Scent Keeper I feel so much more aware of the emotions and memories that certain scents can bring out.
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The Scent Keeper centers around that power that scents can have over our emotions and memories. It tells the story of Emmeline, a girl who was raised on a remote island by her scent-obsessed scientist father, John. He teaches her how to live and survive on this island by using her senses, mostly her sense of smell. As she grows up she learns there is a lot more to her life than she’s been told. She sets off in search of the truth and in doing so experiences both love and the harsh realities of the real world.
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This book has such a beautiful and ethereal vibe to it and just the right amount of magical realism (which for me is very little). I loved following Emmeline’s journey and felt she had the perfect balance of innocence and common sense as she experienced the world around her. She is the main character and the book follows the first 20-ish years of her life. I became endeared to her character early on which kept me wanting to find out how her story ends.
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The information and references to scents and fragrance were fascinating and well-referenced. I hadn’t expected to be as captivated as I was by the role of scents and fragrance in the story. It’s front and center and I ended up really loving that. There were parts in the book that felt a bit slow for me, and other characters I would have liked to see more of, but overall The Scent Keeper was a pleasure to read. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister is a fascinating novel. Emmeline was brought to a deserted island by her father when she was a young child. He is fascinated by scents and has created a Polaroid camera like machine to capture and save them. He stores the strips of paper that are spewed from the machine in sealed glass bottles. Emmeline grows up devoted to her father and the fairy tales he shares with her. When
Emmeline is twelve years old, her life changes forever. Bauermeister masterfully crafts Emmeline's journey and creates an amazing story of courage and love. Reading The Scent Keeper is like smelling a beautiful perfume. Bauermeister's lyrical writing and fascinating characters make the novel one that lingers with her reader for a long time.

I enjoyed this well crafted coming of age story though it is not a genre I usually read. The main characters were well written and the story progresses along nicely. My attention was kept throughout the book and the descriptions of the scents were marvelous. I received a copy from NetGalley and the publisher and this is my honest opinion.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for an eARC of this book.

A lyrical, magical wonderful book that traps you immediately. It is so well written and the characters so well developed
that it enchants from the outset. A coming of age novel filled with love and angst. About the role that scent plays in
our lives. Wondrous!

This book is a gift that I did not expect. The story is by far one of the most unusual and imaginative I’ve read in years, and the characters by turns fascinating and exasperating. I first became interested in the properties of scent, particularly of how scent can trigger memories, when caring for an elderly relative in her last days. Scent was a trigger for her and she shared the loveliest memories with her family during those difficult days.

Emmeline’s experience with scent and the scent-machine is fascinating, and I particularly appreciated how scent continued to play a role in her life even after she’s left the island. I was pleased that she found a new family after her father’s death, and even more pleased that she eventually reconnected with her mother. However, the first meeting between Victoria and Emmeline was a little hard to swallow. Victoria’s acceptance of Emmeline as her daughter was a little too quick from someone being portrayed as hard-as-nails. Even so, their relationship building was interesting, and I totally loved the end, bringing both of them full circle back to John. Fans of M.J. Rose will enjoy this. Recommended.

Thanks to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for a digital galley in exchange for an honest review.

I want to say upfront that a 3 star rating isn't bad in my opinion. Although I didn't fall in love with this book, I did like it. Erica Bauermeister puts her young protagonist, Emmeline on an emotional rollercoaster ride. Throughout this story as Emmeline leaves her remote island, struggles adapting to life, and then heads to the city to investigate unanswered questions, we do enter the world of fragrance.


But all day I cannot seem to get over the hurdle that the author ends her story rather abruptly. It's like reaching the season finale of a television show with a jaw dropping twist and then being informed the show is cancelled. Thanks for driving me mad!!!


All in all, a great storyline but I cannot get any satisfaction.


Goodreads Review 24/05/19

I've read The School of Essential Ingredients and really enjoyed it, so I was really looking forward to Erica Bauermeister's newest novel, The Scent Keeper! This book was magical! Parts of it reminded me a lot of Where the Crawdads Sing--a beautiful coming of age story first about survival but then about figuring out her true past, all set against the premise of scents. Sure, smells are something you think about--but not like this. This book made me think of smells in a whole new way--the smells of nature, how different seasons smell differently, how people smell differently, and how smells can influence your thoughts and memories. I loved Emmaline's beloved dog, Dodge, and the bond she had with him because understood smells in a similar way that dogs do--to tell them who to trust (or not to trust, in the case of Martin). I adored Fisher, and Collette, and Henry. I loved the feeling of living in this world with these characters and didn't want this book to end. I actually felt the ending was left hanging a bit--I was so sad to see the book end and desperately want to know what happens to Emmaline and Fisher. I highly recommend this beautiful, thought provoking, emotional book!!

I have not read a book by Erica Bauermeister before. The Scent Keeper is full of secrets, a coming of age story, longing for family, and friendship. I liked so many parts of this story. I just felt the author was not sure where she wanted to go with the story. I was disappointed with the ending. I wanted Emily to recognize and be reunited with the couple who took her and really raised her. There were parts of the book that I would rate a 5 and others a 3. Will settle for a 4.

My thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I honestly did not know where this book was going when I first started reading, but I quickly became engrossed in Emmeline’s story, and then I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. At times poetic and haunting, at other times exhilarating – but always fascinating, I felt everything right along with Emmeline. I loved the concepts, especially of smells as colors, and was thoroughly intrigued by Emmeline’s abilities. This was a fantastic book that should go on everyone’s “Must Read” list. Visit my blog at Fireflies and Free Kicks Fiction Reviews for more detailed thoughts on this book. A huge thank you to St. Martin’s Press (via NetGalley) for a pre-release digital ARC of this book.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher, for this free review copy. On sale now!

Emmeline lives on a isolated island, with her father. He teaches her how to live off the land and how to use her sense of smell. Once her father passes, she is taken in by a couple off the island. There she goes to school, and starts to learn more about her father and her past, thanks to the internet.

The Scent Keeper was a beautiful book. It focuses on scents, memories, and family. I really enjoyed reading about Emmeline and her self discovery. While it has been compared to Where the Crawdads Sing and The Great Alone, I wouldn't go into this book thinking that, in my opinion.

Thank you so much to St. Martins Press for providing me with a free copy of this book and inviting me to participate in the blog tour!

I’m honestly not even sure where I should start with this book, my mind and body are still trying to process this amazing piece of work. This book has definitely left me with a book hangover and I’m not regretting it.

Emmaline lives on an island with her father and it’s the only home she’s ever known. Her dad tells her amazing stories about Jack the scent keeper and has a machine that captures smells and puts them on pieces of paper that go into little bottles. As Emmaline gets older her curiosity about the thousands of bottles grows and after a tragedy happens, she finds herself thrown into the real world. As she tries to learn more about the new world around her Emmaline also must learn about her true identity and where she actually came from.

When I first started reading this book I was a little put off. The way Emmaline and her father lived was very odd to me and once the scent machine came into the picture I really started getting weirded out. But the author’s writing style kept drawing me back in and I honestly couldn’t put it down. This book gripped me so hard and honestly left me a little emotional. Everything Emmaline went through and had to learn was so hard and I felt so bad for her.

The characters were all so well developed and the relationship between each of them was so different. I loved Fisher and Emmaline’s relationship and I also loved Emmaline’s relationship with her stand in parents. They were all so complex in their own ways but such a joy to read about.

This is a book that is going to stay with me for a long time and I’m so glad that I got the opportunity to read such an amazing book. Getting to follow along with Emmaline’s journey through self discovery and learning all these new things brought tears to my eyes at times but also made me ridiculously happy at others. I haven’t had a book touch me this way and I felt so many different emotions while reading it.

Thank you so much to Erica Bauermeister for writing such an incredible book!

Admittedly, I struggled a little in the beginning, primarily because of the scent machine. The idea that a little machine could capture the complex scent signature of a room, of a person, of a moment, and transfer it to a small piece of paper - a scent paper - where it could be maintained for an extended period of time - well, that was a bit of a stretch for me. Actually, a very long stretch for me. So long that I never really go there, honestly. And suspension of disbelief is so key to getting into the meat of a book, especially when what you are being asked to buy into is a core part of the storyline. However, though it is true that scent is the ribbon that ties the whole story together, the scent machine itself is a background player, and the way in which the author described scent itself was beyond anything I could have imagined.

Scent is such a key part of our every day lives, and our sense of smell is one that we take very much for granted, that we tune out and underestimate, unless what enters our nostrils is especially strong. But every moment of our lives is permeated with a combination of smells that mark a place in time, a sort of signature scent, that changes as we change. What if we were as tuned into the smells that our nose takes in as we are to the sights our eyes take in? We already know that particular scents remind us of certain people, places, events in our lives, but usually only when they are significant to us. And how much thought do we give to how scent influences us? All of these ideas are explored in The Scent Keeper, and I found that to be a truly engrossing part of the reading experience. Not just that it was a unique basis on which to build a book, but that it was highly relevant. Good stuff, that.

Aside from that, the relationship building, the insights about trying to figure out who you are, about giving and getting second chances, trying to understand others and showing empathy until you can, about how we define ourselves in light of those who have taken care of us (or not), how some things and some people cannot be understood and instead must be accepted, and so much more. The characters were flesh and blood, fully formed people that I cared about from the beginning. I would have liked to have spent a little more time with them. In fact, my singular disappointment is that the ending came too quickly and felt rather abrupt. Aside from that, it was a fantastic read.

On the whole, this is a lovely coming-of-age book that digs into the complexity of identity, family, relationships, loyalty and love, all the while exploring the pervasiveness of scent in our lives and the way in which it enriches them.

Thanks to #NetGalley #StMartinsPress for a free digital copy of #TheScentKeeper in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Emmeline lives on a small isolated and remote island with her father. They function as survivalists by foraging and growing their own food. Even though Emmeline and her father are isolated, the father has a contact who arrives by boat and occasionally delivers items that can't be acquired on the island. Emmeline's father teaches her about the natural world through her senses. Emmeline's world is filled with love and security and it's all she knows. Her father also has a mysterious machine that creates or captures scents (similar to a Polaroid camera), and he has scents stored in drawers that line the walls of their cabin. Although she's curious about the scents, her father doesn't offer a great deal of explanation. One day, Emmeline is forced out into the real world beyond the sanctuary of her island. She sets out on a quest to understand the life her father created for them, her father's reasons, and the secrets he safeguarded.

What constitutes a memorable read for you?

If you love Where the Crawdads Sing for the setting descriptions, you might appreciate The Scent Keeper in which the northern isolated island setting is like a character in the story. The descriptions are exquisite and readers are transported there.

If determination, courage, thoughtfulness, loyalty, and compassion are traits that you admire in characters, then you might love Emmeline. Reminiscent of the main character in stories such as Where the Crawdads Sing, The Great Alone, The Glass Castle, or Educated, Emmeline is resilient, relentless, and fearless as she grapples with the truth of her father's actions and reconciles his love for her with his choices to protect her. Throughout the story, I cared for Emmeline and what happened to her.

The use of SCENT to move the story along is unique and something to which we can all make connections. Scent is a compelling part of the entire story: scent is an important part of Emmeline's childhood, and then she eventually finds work in the perfume industry. I found the discussion and descriptions of scent fascinating and it reminds me of a book from a few years ago, The Perfume Collector.

While reading The Scent Keeper, I spent a considerable amount of time pondering and noticing scents! Scents from childhood are particularly memorable. Then there are scents that belong to certain seasons or occasions. The scent of lilac transports me immediately back to my childhood on a South Dakota farm where I played for hours and hours beneath and around our huge lilac bush growing in the front yard. What scents are memorable and magical for you?

If you appreciate writing that is multi-layered, you will find The Scent Keeper stimulating. I love writing which allows me to create my own meaning! I can't know if this was the author's intent or not, but I kept thinking of the SCENTS that the father was so desperate to capture and save as a symbol for memories. He stressed the idea of creating them, keeping them safe, the preciousness of them, and taking them out with the utmost of care to relive or experience them again. The beginning of the story is rich in symbolism and metaphor (with a sprinkling of magical realism), and the latter half of the story moves into a more literal and realistic realm.

The trajectory of the story reminds me of the journey from childhood to young adulthood. As children, we completely trust our parents and they are our whole world, the source of our truth, safety, and comfort. As we become young adults, we see that our parents might not be perfect, they might have flaws or secrets, and their choices might seem questionable. As young adults and adults, we see the reality of the world might not be congruent with the magical innocence of childhood and the safe world our parents created. We can finally see our parents as flawed people doing the best that they could.

Perhaps, like me, you're enamored with important themes presented throughout a story. The Scent Keeper doesn't disappoint! Thought-provoking themes include father/daughter relationships, loyalty, trust, sacrifice, secrets, and coming of age. All these themes make for great book club discussion!

I can assure you that I highly recommend The Scent Keeper and it ticks all the boxes for a wonderful and memorable reading experience for me. It is written beautifully with lyrical prose, delightful imagery, vivid details, and creative figurative language; it's a coming of age tale of a spirited and resourceful young woman; it describes a unique setting; it explores important themes, and it features a unique premise.

The following observation falls under personal preference: I think the one weakness is that this engaging and beautifully told story deserves a more satisfactory conclusion (however, other reviewers have disagreed with me!). This explains why I didn't give five full stars.

Nevertheless, I fully recommend The Scent Keeper for fans of contemporary literary fiction, for readers who appreciate beautiful prose, and for book clubs.

My Rating: 4.5 Stars (rounded up to 5 stars on Goodreads and NetGalley)

Review published on blog 5/24/19

It's book review time.  I went with something a bit more literary than I'm used to, but I wanted to shake things up a bit.  When I was browsing NetGalley, The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister caught my eye.  So, as usual, I must thank them and St. Martin's Press for giving me access to the novel in exchange for an unbiased review.  The novel was due out on May 21st.  Now, let's get to the review.

The Scent Keeper follows Emmeline as she grows up on a remote island with only her father and their mysterious scent-papers to keep her company.  Her childhood is filled with fairy tales and the type of fantastical fun that only opening up your senses can get you.  However, as she grows, so does her curiosity.  After making discoveries her father refuses to explain, life starts changing until she's finally flung out into the real world with no safety net.  Can she adjust to real life?  How is she supposed to find out about her origins when her father never told her much?  These are just a couple of questions the book explores.

First, I want to talk about the use of the senses in this book because it's amazing.  Most stories tend to lean hard on sight because that's probably the easiest way to explain the world around you.  Not this book.  As you can probably guess, it uses the sense of smell to propel us through Emmeline's world.  Her other senses work fine, but her nose is what she's been taught to follow all her life.  She reads scents the way other people read facial expressions.  Smells can't betray her the way other things can.  Or that's what she thinks.  But the focus on smells as both deep memory triggers and helpful everyday tools is really neat.

The story itself is weird because it has a tendency to move really slow, then speed up, then keep jumping between slow and fast.  I don't know if that was just because I wasn't as interested in Emmeline as I was some of the other characters or what, but even the slow parts were nice.  I was in love with the story, so the pace didn't really matter.  Then the ending happened and everything fell apart for me.  I knew what was going to happen, but not where it would happen.  I was hoping for a return to the island for the big finale, but what I got was an abrupt ending that left so much open that it was unsatisfying.  I mean, Fisher (the love interest) was waiting for Emmeline to return to the cove (her childhood home after she had left the island) with him.  They had plans.  Does she just leave him waiting?  Does she go back home?  Nothing is explained and it reminded me why I avoid straight litfic.  Nothing is ever satisfactorily resolved and it's annoying as all get out.

As far as the writing goes, it is a beautiful and lyrical experience.  The description is gorgeous.  It makes the focus on scent easy to picture or understand even when I wasn't sure what some of the things smelled like.  The pace is weird but the rhythm of the writing flows nicely.

Ultimately, I'm happy to have had a chance to be exposed to such wonderful writing in The Scent Keeper, but the ending ruined everything for me.

Overall, I gave it 3 out of five stars.  What I enjoyed of it, I really enjoyed, but what I didn't like got the best of me in the end.  If you don't mind a story that just cuts off but has lovely prose, pick it up.

The Scent Keeper is one of those books that I know my review won't do justice to, but I'm going to try.

This book is wonderful. The main character is Emmeline and I loved how we got to explore her island world through her eyes and experiences. Her upbringing was definitely odd and not once, but twice, she had to learn an entirely new world as the story progresses.

I felt sorry for her because of what all she missed out on, living on the island. I found a couple of the adults extremely selfish and I wanted to slap them and tell them to wake up, but of course, I couldn't. There were caring, self-less characters that I'd have enjoyed knowing also and the settings were so very well described. I felt as if I could see what Emmeline saw and could smell what she smelt. In my opinion, that is a huge talent and I appreciate this author sharing her talent with me.

Pick this book up now ~ and you'll probably find yourself recommending it to everyone and buying copies for friends. It's that darn good.

Thank you to the author, publishers and Netgalley for approving me for an ARC. The thoughts in this review are my own and freely given.

Scent is the strongest sense tied to memory. One smell can conjure up a whole moment in your life, that you thought you had completely forgotten about. "When you change a scent, you change the memory..."(Quote taken from advanced copy)

Emmeline and her father live on a remote island. It's just the two of them and Emmeline has learned all she knows from her father, but the greatest thing she has learned, is how to use scents to determine what is going on in the world. Cut off from the rest of society, people are just objects in books, and her father is the only other physical person she knows. When she turns 13 and is forced into the "real" world, she quickly discovers that it's more than scents that she will need to make it in life.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the opportunity to read and review this book.

When I first heard about this book, I was quite intrigued. A whole book about a cottage filled with drawers of scents. How was this going to play out? Would it hold my attention? Boy did it ever. will admit, when I started reading, I was skeptical about which direction the book would take me. The journey was exciting and thrilling and it left me wanting more.

The Scent Keeper is the first book I have read by Erica Bauermeister, but I do look forward to reading more books by her. This is the type of book that is kind of hard to review without giving too much of the story away. This is a story that you will feel in your heart. You will start to understand and smell scents in a different way.

This book has something for everyone in it. A little bit of magic, thrills, just a touch of romance, and scents from all over. I think that if you pick up this book you will enjoy it. I wasn't sure after the description and reading the first couple of chapters, but this story really grew on me and it will stay with me for a while.

In this coming of age women’s fiction novel, Emmeline lives an isolated life on an island with her father who teaches her about the natural world, including using her senses. The story is told in three parts and offers three different voices throughout which was not something that I expected. At times that worked for me and at other times not so much but overall there was a quality to the writing that I found engrossing and beautiful.

When Emmeline has to leave the island and learn about life for herself and how her senses process what is going on around her. She uncovers secrets, learns about broken trust and promises. Scent colors the story throughout in different ways and from different perspectives as the story progresses, sometimes as a backdrop, sometimes as a central component. It was really a different book for me and I enjoyed it. I loved Emmeline’s search for herself.

Overall, an interesting tale of a isolated young woman learning that there is more to the world around her than she experienced on the island.

An ARC was provided for review.

Favorite Quotes:

We are the unwitting carriers of our parents’ secrets, the ripples made by stones we never saw thrown… We humans are almost entirely made of water, except for the stones of our secrets.

I remember the way the rain seemed to talk to the roof as I fell asleep, and how the fire would snap and tell it to be quiet… I could feel the tendrils of a fragrance tickling the inside of my nose, slipping into the curls of my black hair… I inhaled, and fell into the fragrance like Alice down the rabbit hole.

My father had told me that many things in fairy tales weren’t real, but my problem was I didn’t always know which ones.

Cleopatra the goat rapidly became Cleo, but both names fit. She was still young enough for a nickname, but she had aspirations of grandeur, my father said. She ruled us from the very beginning.

The woman’s pants hugged her so tightly I thought at first she had blue legs…

Looking at her was like gazing into one of those enchanted mirrors and seeing a beautiful, older, far more assured version of myself.


My Review:

Erica Bauermeister is a master storyteller, an expert wordsmith, and an agile weaver of creative and fanciful tales that transport the mind as well as painfully massage the coronary muscle. I ran the gamut while reading, I was transfixed, intrigued, appalled, frustrated, enraged, despondent, deeply moved, entertained, impatient, brokenhearted, and nearly insane with curiosity; yet through it all, I was also 100% engaged and fully immersed in the tale.

The writing was lushly descriptive, evocatively detailed, insightfully observant, and simply beguiling. I have a keen sense of smell and was all too easily slotted within Emmeline’s head. I was instantly taken with and understood her assignment of colors, sounds, shapes, and emotions to corresponding scents. Yet I could never have imagined the sense of carefree abandon and adult encouragement to believe in magic and fairy tales during her rustic early childhood on an isolated island, although I would certainly have reveled in that as a child.

The captivating storylines were ingeniously creative, undeniably consuming, and cast with tantalizingly elusive, and uniquely compelling and stunningly clever characters who were a bit unsettling as they appeared peculiarly off center and while most were not dangerous, several were more than a tad beyond slippery. I was reluctant to put this book down for any length of time and continued to ruminate over this consuming story whenever those displeasing tasks otherwise known as daily living rudely interrupted my reading. In sum, Erica Bauermeister has a new fangirl.

I was caught from the beginning of this novel, which is always something I'm skeptical about, and I read the first part (of three in the story) in less than an hour. Time flew by and I wasn't aware of it! Always a good sign. The book is broken up into three parts, the first dealing with her childhood on an island with her father. It's hard to tell much of what happens in the other parts without giving anything away, but the language and skill Bauemeister writes with creates a world you can't help but enjoy and be interested in hearing more about.

The character of Emmeline is intriguing and clever. She's a sharp and curious girl, willing to be courageous, brave, and resourceful. The first part of the book raises some compelling questions, problems, and issues Emmeline has to work out, and I was pleased with the plot's direction, the construction and flow of the story, as well as the answers we're given to those questions. This world of scents and smells, the memories they invoke and compell us and Emmeline to discover are curious, unique, and interesting.

I enjoyed spending time in this world. It was fun to explore, compelling and quick to read, and the writing earned the feelings from me, which I always appreciate.

4 stars
We have had it happen... we are doing whatever and out of the blue a scent hits us and brings back a serious memory. The scent of Shalimar will always be my mother. She collected the perfume and bottles...and this tale takes those type of feeling and ties them to a story which covers so much. A beautiful tale.