The Scent Keeper by Erica Bauermeister

Emmaline lives on a remote island with her father.  He teaches her survival, about the land around her and how to navigate the world through scents.  Lining their small cabin are colored jars filled with papers that contain all sorts of scents.  On rare occasions her father allows her to open a jar and smell the paper inside.  Each jar evokes different memories.  He is, however, very tight lipped about these jars  but Emmaline knows there is a machine in the closet that puts the scents onto the paper.  At the very top of the rows of jars is a bottle that no one is allowed to touch and which her father will not talk about at all, the same way he won't talk about her mother.  While small her world is quite content filled with learning through her senses and the mysterious mermaid who delivers special things to the island just for her,  as she grows older more and more questions arise.  When tragedy strikes and shakes Emmaline's whole world she must now, as a teenager, learn to navigate a whole new world, the "real" world  that she has never been a part of and is totally unprepared for.   In the midst of her struggles, Emmaline knows that she must somehow learn more about the mother she never knew.  But in learning about her mother will she still feel the same about her father?

This was an absolutely unique story.  It's a coming of age story that deals family, secrets, mental health, ambition, betrayal, guilt, and love.  I was drawn to it because it is a story that had scent as a main theme.  Though it took me a while to get into it, I am so glad I stuck with it, though it was not without it's flaws.  The characters draw you in and my heart was taken with Emmaline's struggles to fit in and find herself and understand the world in which she in a moment's notice found herself.   The writing is lyrical and has lovely imagery but because of that it also contains imagery that is hard to read.   I'm never a fan of teenage sexual experiences in stories and this did contain some of that though it wasn't overly detailed.  The story is heart warming and heart breaking all at the same time.  I liked learning about scent and memories and how scent is used in commercial applications to make people feel a certain way.  How Emmaline navigated her world through scent was very well written.  Though there have been some negative comments about the ending, I liked it. 

I gave it a 9.5/10

Reading Challenge Goal Met:  A book purchased in 2019-2021 and Read Your Shelf Challenge for July:  A title that starts with the first letter of your first name