This book was beyond cute and exactly the light-hearted summer read that I needed. While I wasn't into coding in high school, I was nerdy. I also had a lot of friends and while Emma didn't it reminded me of the few friends that I always hung out with, the ones that were probably up to no good, but trying our best to behave. This was the perfect amount of the nativity that many young girls have in high school and I have seen some of them still holding onto it in our 30s. I was looking for a easy breeze summer read and this book did exactly that.

If there is a Jane Austen modernization, you can bet I will be reading it. I love them. This one was set in high school, so it was a little harder for me to get into, but I still ended up liking it. The names in the book were exactly the same as in Emma and it followed the plot line pretty well, except for a few parts, and those parts bothered me a little bit.
Emma is on a coding team in high school and she comes up with an app that will match you with someone that is compatible with you from their high school. She has some success and some epic failures, but her friends are behind her and want to win the coding contest with their app.
I had to look past the high school situation and remember why I love Emma so much. There was high school drama and I believe that will add to the story for many people, I just like a modernization that follows the story more, only because it makes the love that George has for Emma more profound. I kept waiting for the feels, and I did get them, but it wasn't until the last pages. This book was bumped up to a 3.5 star because of all the feelings I had in the end. If you like high school and you like Jane Austen modernization books, you will enjoy this retelling of Emma.

I've never read Emma and am pretty averse to romance, but I am a huge Clueless fan, so was excited to read this retelling. Emma is a self-proclaimed nerd who would barely recognize most of her classmates as she is so focused on getting into Stanford. But when her sister leaves for college with the advice that Emma finally get a boyfriend, Emma decides to see if she can figure out an algorithm for love, and use it to spur her coding club to competition victory. But can love be boiled down into lines of code?
This was absolutely adorable, I enjoyed all the references to building an app, and Emma was just so cute that I could ignore the corniness of the repeated "what is this weird feeling I keep getting around this person" scenes. The Code for Love and Heartbreak is a light and uplifting read about being true to yourself and the power of friendship, perfect for fans of Gayle Forman's I Have Lost My Way.

Review posted on Goodreads (July 11, 2020)
Review Linked

3/5 stars!

A huge thank you to NetGalley and Inkyard Press for sending me an E-ARC of this book for an honest review!

I was really excited to read this book because I am a huge fan of 'Clueless' which is an 'Emma' retelling. This book was really cute, but it was not as good as I was hoping it would be. I found myself bored with the plot of the book even though I really liked the characters and the romance. I just felt like the pacing of the book was a bit slow.

However, I did enjoy reading this book even though it did not meet my high expectations. If you are a fan of Jane Austen's ‘Emma’, and love retellings of that story, then I really recommend picking this book up. It is a really fun, easy, YA contemporary romance.

Thanks for reading!
Caden

This book was such an adorable and easy read. I devour contemporary romanced and this one did not disappoint. I read most of it in one sitting. The characters were fun and relatable. I love friends to lovers so and enjoyed the swoon worthy romance development. Definitely worth the read.

Emma thinks in numbers. Numbers make sense to her. People, on the other hand, are a lot more complicated. When the coding club needs a new project for the upcoming competition, she comes up with an idea: what if she wrote the code for love? Along with her fellow club members, she begins to work on a type of matchmaking app. Using fellow students as test subjects, Emma continues to work on and improve her algorithm. However, things start going wrong. Emma is left to wonder whether there are things math can't solve and if love can ever be truly figured out in code.

This book was pretty charming and cute! I'm sad to say that I've never read Jane Austen's Emma, which this book is a modern retelling of, but I was still able to enjoy the book! The character development in this book was particularly amazing. The main characters and the side characters both were fun to read about. It took a bit for the plot to get going, but it was good once it started! The importance of friendship, love, and family was a major part of this book. Ultimately, this was a short and sweet YA read about the unpredictability and importance of love and relationships!

This book was so cute! It is described as a retelling of the classic, Emma, but I’ve never read that so I cannot compare. I enjoyed the premise and quirky, socially awkward characterization - being a coding/robotics teacher myself, it just made me really happy!

Emma's senior year is going to be all about numbers, and seeing how far they can take her. When she and George, her Coding Club co-president, are tasked with brainstorming a new project, The Code for Love is born—a matchmaking app that goes far beyond swiping, using algorithms to calculate compatibility.

I thought this book was really well done. I really connected with the characters. I think there is a really positive message for girls and women in STEM as well, because half of the club was female, and they all contributed so much to the project. As a women in STEM myself, I appreciate the connection!

This story is heartbreakingly cute and it’s a version of Emma we really haven’t seen before. She’s a nerd, unsure of herself, and missing her big sister who loved to the West Coast for college.

Emma and George are co-presidents of the coding club and they want to win at state this year. To do that they need a really good idea and so the matchmaking app is born.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Austen’s Emma but it was still interesting to have her as a teenager in high school and made her (in my opinion) much more enjoyable.

I am a sucker for any Emma retellings. This retelling did not disappoint. I just love the storyline! Emma Woodhouse (the protagonist) is so relatable. I loved her voice and walking through her story with her. My socially awkward heat connected with her. I am definitely recommending this novel to my students.

An adorable, and believable, modern day retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma with a couple twists. Emma Woodhouse is a not so typical NJ senior in high school. She’s a math nerd - Co-President of her school’s coding club and an exceptional piano player, an overachiever who aspires to attend Stanford. But of course, no path is as straight as one wants it to be even for social-averse smart girls. Like Emma.

I love reading Jane Austen-esque books, so I was really excited to find this modern retelling of Emma. There were a lot of things about it I liked. I could really relate to the main character, Emma Woodhouse. I found it really interesting to see how the author put a modern twist on the plot of the original book. I ended up really liking the book, but not loving it.

SUMMARY

Emma Woodhouse is a genius at math, but clueless about people. After all, people are unreliable. They let you down—just like Emma's sister, Izzy, did this year, when she moved to California for college. But numbers...those you can count on. (No pun intended.)

Emma's senior year is going to be all about numbers, and seeing how far they can take her. When she and George, her Coding Club co-president, are tasked with brainstorming a new project, The Code for Love is born—a matchmaking app that goes far beyond swiping, using algorithms to calculate compatibility. George disapproves of Emma's idea, accusing her of meddling in people's lives. But all the happy new couples at school are proof that the app works. At least at first.

Emma's code is flawless. So why is it that perfectly matched couples start breaking up, the wrong people keep falling for each other and her own feelings defy any algorithm? Emma thought math could solve everything. But there's nothing more complex—or unpredictable—than love.
REVIEW

It's no secret that I love rom-coms AND classic lit retellings, so requesting this one was kind of a no-brainer for me. I mean, a modern-day "Emma" retelling about STEM nerds? YES PLEASE. So I was thrilled to get this ARC - and for the most part, it didn't disappoint. 

Seeing as this is very obviously an "Emma" retelling (most of the characters even keep their names), I will admit that having read the original book beforehand helped me get into this. I knew what role each character would play, the basics of the plot, and what was probably going to happen. But it definitely departs enough from the plot of the book (non-spoilery examples: the Harriet/Robert subplot doesn't exist, and Jane Fairfax plays a very different role in "Code for Love" than she does in the Austen version) enough that it's easy to follow along with if you haven't. And if you HAVE read the original, like I have, there's enough that's new here to interest: the emphasis on computer science is really fun and technology is integrated super well, making a dated story feel perfectly at-home in the modern world. The premise was really fun, and for the most part, I really enjoyed it. 

The characters were fun, too: Emma was just as lovably flawed as her source-material counterpart; I actually liked this Jane even more than the original version; and I loved what Cantor did with Izzy, Emma's older sister. (I found it kind of hilarious that Izzy goes to UCLA in this because I'm going to USC next year, so every mention of UCLA made me smirk like mad because hehe, rivals. I'm so freakin' immature, I know.) They were easy to like and, unlike in the original, there were less sleazy potential love interests, which is always cool. As to the story itself...well, you can't go wrong with Jane Austen. Just sayin'. 

Though it didn't have the instant "oomph" of my absolute favorite books, "The Code for Love and Heartbreak" was a really fun read that I'd highly recommend. 

ENDNOTES

Content: pretty much none! Unless I'm forgetting something, the ONLY adult content I can remember reading was a single, vague allusion to the possibility that two characters are sleeping together (and it's literally just that - an incredibly vague two-sentence reference). It's always nice to see books as clean as this one! 

Rating: 4.5/5 Confused Llamas

This is a modern day twist on Emma by Jane Austen. I was super stoked after reading the premise and couldn’t wait to read this. I absolutely adore Emma. In this version Emma is a coder in highschool who decided to make a match making app in order to win a coding competition, and things go awry from there. In this version Emma is a socially awkward and shy coder who doesn’t understand love but understands math (her words). George knightly is her co-president and friend in coding club. Here’s the thing, I think this book is fine and I mean I’m sure a lot of people could love it, however it just did not work for me. The entire George and Emma situation just did not work for me. I didn’t feel their chemistry and I actually was much more invested in the friendship between Emma and Jane. Overall this book is great if you don’t really care for the original version of the story but I just didn’t like it as much as I wish I could have. If you’re looking for a quirky story about two coders and an app this might be for you!

This was overall a cute story, and I liked the friendship between Emma and George and how it evolved into something more. I liked how well they worked together and how close they were. The "code for love" part of this story was interesting, but Emma's way of going about things was a little frustrating.

I liked the coding club and how they worked together, and how Sam and Jane proved that there was more to love than the algorithm Emma came up with, how sometimes it just couldn't be explained or quantified.

This book was hilarious in all the right ways. High schoolers in an after school club just trying to make an impact to everyone. This book hooked me from the very beginning with the different dynamics of every character that makes me wonder, will the code work for everyone? Easy and entertaining read.

I was provided with an eARC of this book in exchange for a fair review.

I am a sucker for modern retellings, and "Emma" makes for a great base story! This adaptation was fun and quirky and perfect for a summer read! I loved the cast of characters (both new and "old") and the premise of a matchmaking app. I will say that this Emma was sometimes hard to like, mostly because her motives seemed less altruistic (like those of Austen's Emma) and more selfish - her desire to prove her app worked and her math was accurate made her blind to whether she was ACTUALLY making people happy or not. Even so, it was wonderful to see her grow as a character, and to see the dynamic between her and George. All in all, 4 stars!

I loved this book, I felt like it was the perfect amount of angst on both Emma and Goerge's part. I loved the overall story, even though this kind of premise has been done before Jillian Cantor puts their own spin on it so it feels new and fresh. Overall I really enjoyed the romance and getting to see a girl main character who kicks butt and is really good at what she does, something that I applauded the author for doing throughout the novel instead of just saying she creates the app and leave it at that there is a followthrough through the entire book. I had one tiny grievance with this, but that's just my personal preference so I can kind of overlook it and isn't integral to how I felt about the book overall.

In this contemporary YA retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma, the code for love doesn’t go as expected when a matchmaking app that Emma designs for a coding club competition doesn’t work out quite the way the math proves it will. It is well written and is easy, lighthearted reading in this predictable, yet charming story.
3.5 stars

Advanced copy provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Although the story seemed predicable, I really enjoyed this retelling of a matchmaker gone wrong. I think students will love the story because they have not seen it play out many times already in other stories. At parts, it felt like a Disney movie but in a good way.

Emma is a high school senior who is the president of the coding club and socially awkward. Can you see where this is going? After her counselor tells her that her perfect grades and clubs aren't enough to get her into her dream school of Stanford, she tries to figure out how to bring the "social" aspect to her application. Enter again the coding club. She decides that she can code her way in.

The story is a light and easy to read tale that might help spark interest in coding for middle school girls. Often the STEM subjects are seem as geeky and dorky.

*3.5 stars*

*3.5 stars*
If you’re looking for a sweet, quick YA book, this is it! This modern retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma was really cute. The story starts off strong with a high school coding club, where the students help each other learn how to code, and their idea of creating an app that matches all the students in their school based on math. I mean, who wouldn’t want love to be that easy?

Our MC, Emma, was definitely frustrating at times, but somehow still likeable and relatable. And I like any story that has strong female friendships, and portrays young women as having goals that don’t just include having a boyfriend. The side characters really shone here, and I found myself wanting to know more about Jane and Ms. Taylor in particular! Also, just a personal preference, but the chapters in this book were really short, which I always like because it makes reading the book seem so much faster.

That being said, this is a YA book, so a lot of the plot (even the few heavier moments) seemed to stay at the surface level. This book also seemed to fall into that trap of “nerdy” girls all being socially awkward, while the more outgoing girls are all not as book smart.

Overall, though, I think young readers will really enjoy this book, and relate to these characters!

This book comes out October 6, 2020. Thank you to NetGalley, Inkyard Press, and the author for a review copy!