In this contemporary romcom retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma by USA TODAY bestselling author Jillian Cantor, there’s nothing more complex—or unpredictable—than love.When math genius Emma and her coding club co-president, George, are tasked with brainstorming a new project, The Code for Love is born.George disapproves of Emma’s idea of creating a matchmaking app, accusing her of meddling in … Emma’s idea of creating a matchmaking app, 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 Emma’s own feelings defy any algorithm?
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I loved this book! The romance was cute and sweet and the characters were written perfectly and I loved them.Emma and her dad had such a great family dynamic and it added a lot to this story. It was a fun concept of coding for matchmaking and the author pulled it off perfectly. There were some funny moments that I really enjoyed. This was such a cute, YA romance with great characters and I would totally recommend this book!
Super cute!
Who else loves rom-com retellings of Emma? THE CODE FOR LOVE AND HEARTBREAK by Jillian Cantor delivers a fresh and STEM-inspired take on the Jane Austen classic that is pure breezy, geeky, romantic fun! There is just the right amount of nods to the original, but plenty of fresh new takes on this premise as well. The Emma in this book is somewhat socially awkward in the most endearing way, and she’s completely determined and focused when it comes to her future and coding. I really enjoyed watching her stumble and pick herself right back up and I especially loved her friendship with Jane. If you enjoy Jane Austen retellings like I do and want a quick fun read, add this one to your list!
“Everything can’t be solved with an equation, Em. If you feel something…just let yourself feel it, okay?”
The Code for Love and Heartbreak was so stinking cute. It takes a bit to really find its pace, but once you really dive in with Emma, her family, and her friends, you will not want to stop reading. This is described as a retelling of the classic, Emma, but I’ve never read that, so I’m going to say for myself and others who also haven’t read it, that TCFLAH is like the socially awkward and brainy version of the movie Clueless. (Also a retelling of Emma)
Emma is socially awkward and openly admits to missing some social cues. She relates to things better when they involved numbers, and people are nowhere near as reliable as numbers. I think it might be hard for some to connect to Emma at the start,but my advice is to keep going. This story is about her journey, and while it is a bit rocky, it is worth it to see her blossom.
This book focuses on Emma’s senior year and what she’s looking forward to most, which is winning the team coding competition at the state level. To do that she comes up with a sort of love match app that calculates compatibility based on data, formulas, and code. She has to work hard to convince her team that it’s a winner. That an equation and some code is all it takes to find someone a love match. Along the way she uses the app to set people up, and she finds that maybe love isn’t actually quantifiable.
All in all this was a great YA read. It was sweet and while our lead character was not perfect, she was relatable in so many ways. The feeling of young love. The confusion of being ready to leave home and start your adult life, but also not wanting to leave everything behind. It’s just, good. Recommend for anyone looking for a sweet YA.
I liked this way more than I expected to! I usually guess from an illustrated cover like this that I’m going to get a piece of fluffy, politically correct chick lit. While that’s exactly what it was, it had one (for me) major redeeming quality: it was a retelling of Jane Austen’s “Emma.” I knew this going in (otherwise I never would have bought it), but I think I expected it to be looser than it was. It was Emma with a very modern twist: instead of simply fixing people up, she’s a coder who literally writes a dating app for coding club in her high school. What really hooked me was the fact that all the characters had the same names as in the original, or very close to the same names in some cases. This meant that I had emotional associations for and attachments to all of the characters the second they were introduced.
This version of Emma is a nerd, not a beautiful young socialite who happens to not care to marry. Instead of marriage with children, her sister Izzy went off to college with John on the other side of the country. John’s younger brother George (Knightley) is Emma’s neighbor and family friend, but they aren’t really friends with each other so much as rivals in all of their classes. Now, they’re co-presidents of the coding club. He disapproves of her dating app idea for the state coding competition, but it catches on… and, like the original Emma’s disastrous matchmaking attempts, it has unintended consequences.
The character of Frank Churchill this time is called Sam as a nickname. Certain elements of his original dynamic with Emma and Jane don’t fit into modern times. Nobody in high school would really be engaged, secretly or otherwise, so the author had to go about it differently. Harriet Smith in this version is called Hannah (I guess Harriet is too old-fashioned) and rather than her low status deriving from her uncertain parentage, in this case she’s a freshman to Emma’s and George’s senior. One thing that kind of didn’t work for me was that in the Victorian era, there was no courtship at all: there was flirtation followed by engagement, or flirtation followed by heartbreak. This left opportunity for misunderstandings, such as when Harriet believed that Mr Knightley was in love with her and likely to marry her, when in fact he was just being kind on someone else’s behalf. Such misunderstandings could never occur today, so the author had to have characters actually date people they didn’t truly have feelings for. She explains this away as a sense of obligation in order to show faith in their app, but I can’t see any of them actually doing this–it would be too deliberately misleading and cruel, and the person getting “used” would be rightly outraged when they found out about it. Yet that never happens in the book.
While this version of Emma isn’t really all that likable, I guess the original wasn’t either… yet they are both identifiable, which is all that matters in a main character I suppose. I did love the dynamic between Emma and George as much as I did in the original. Once I got about 2/3 in, I didn’t want to put it down.
My rating: ****
Language: none that I can recall
Sexual content: alluded to but only vaguely, not present in the story
Violence: none
Political content: present, in an annoyingly overt box-checking kind of way. But, it’s a mainstream chick lit book, what did I expect.
Fun, G-rated, STEM, girl-power, YA romantic comedy
Emma Woodhouse is an extremely introverted, high school senior who is a genius at math and also gifted at playing the piano. She is trying to expand her extracurricular activities on the advice of her academic advisor in order to increase her chances of getting accepted to her dream school, Stanford. One such activity, Coding Club, which she has participated in during previous school years, seems as if it could become a real addition to her Stanford application when Emma comes up with what she considers a terrific idea for a computer programming project which might take their team all the way to the top in the annual State competition. Her idea is a dating app which she dubs, The Code for Love. It uses algorithms to calculate romantic compatibility.
Prior to this year, Emma’s best and only friend has always been her older sister, Isabella, in spite of social-butterfly Izzy being Emma’s complete opposite. But Izzy is now a college freshman. She has been madly and mutually in love for many years with a boy named John Knightley, and she has followed John all the way across the country to California for college. Emma feels lonely and abandoned when she no longer has Izzy to talk to and generally help her relate to the rest of the human race. John’s younger brother, George, who is Emma’s age, is someone she’s known for years, but they’ve never been close friends. And as co-presidents of the Coding Club this year, they immediately butt heads over what project the club will do for the State competition.
George dislikes the whole concept of Emma’s app, which he views as an intrusive form of meddling in people’s lives. But he and his allies in the club are outvoted by those who like Emma’s idea, and The Code for Love becomes the app they develop.
At first the app seems to work really well, and all the students in their high school who use it to gain a match are delighted. But then, suddenly, to Emma’s dismay, many of the matched couples begin to break up. And along the way of figuring out why, Emma’s competitive and often combative relationship with George begins to shift in ways that no computer code could ever have predicted.
This is a G-rated novel suitable for all ages and is a fun retelling of Jane Austen’s Emma. The author uses the same character names from Emma, and each character she recycles is a modern update of Austen’s characters. Unlike in the original, instead of George Knightley being 17 years older than Emma, who is 20 in the Austen book, in this story the two are both 17. In addition, instead of Emma’s sister Isabella being much older than Emma and married to John Knightley for many years, in this book they are only one year older and not yet married. Mr. Woodhouse in this story is not a hypochondriacal old man but a vital, middle-aged attorney. Mrs. Weston is currently still Miss Taylor. She is a teacher at Emma’s school and faculty supervisor of the Coding Club. During this book, in a humorous subplot, Ms. Taylor is courted by Mr. Weston, who is a nerdy calculus teacher at Emma’s high school. Frank Churchill, Jane Fairfax, Harriet Smith, Robert Martin and Phillip Elton appear in this book as student members of the Coding Club.
Emma is a cute and lovable female protagonist. I could relate to her struggles with social situations as an introvert, and I enjoyed the emphasis on her as a STEM heroine. I also liked this version of George Knightley. Humorously, he has some of the same stuffy bossiness as the original, and his competing idea for an app is quite funny.
I rate this book as follows:
Heroine: 4 stars
Hero: 4 stars
Subcharacters: 4 stars
Romance Plot: 4 stars
Coming of Age Plot: 4 stars
Writing: 4 stars
Overall: 4 stars
Although Emma is not my favorite Jane Austen story, I love stories of love between friends and cupid so when I saw that this book was inspired by that one I didn’t think twice and I took it to read and I really liked it.
The story revolves around Emma, a shy nerd who feels abandoned when her sister goes to college far from home. Determined to fulfill the missing items to submit her application to the college of her dreams, she focuses on the school’s Coding club project.
As she is excited to create an app to connect mathematically compatible couples, she begins to realize that life is not as precise as mathematics. However during this journey, she begins to make new friends and realize that she may be enjoying her fun and sociable colleague George.
Between confusions, unusual dates, confessions, Emma will need to rediscover herself and decide what she wants to fight for.
While Emma isn’t my favorite Jane Austen book, it IS my favorite romance and my favorite hero. So even though math & numbers are most definitely not my thing, I couldn’t resist reading this cute new Young Adult retelling of Austen’s classic by Jillian Cantor. And, after all, I am a sucker for best friends who fall in love (married to mine for 20 years now).
Retellings are always a bit tricky because they could go either way. On the one hand, they might be too kitschy in how they incorporate the story elements – and on the other hand, they might not be true enough to the story in this new setting. I am pleased to report that The Code for Love and Heartbreak has neither of these problems. If you are already familiar with Austen’s classic, you will love the creative way Cantor keeps the heart of the story and adds her own flavor as well. And, if you’ve never read Emma, you’ll still be able to appreciate a cute story and a breath-stealing romance.
I love that Emma and her friends are nerdy & socially awkward without being over the top about it (though at the beginning of the story ‘friends’ is probably a generous title to give the other members of the coding club). I mean, don’t get me wrong… Emma especially can’t see past numbers and equations and quantifiable things. She misses a lot of social cues that most of us are comfortable with, and she has some definitely wince-worthy moments that come from not socializing enough. But, unless we were in the super popular crowd (and maybe even if we were) don’t we all have similar memories from high school too? I enjoyed seeing her character growth throughout the novel, and on the flip side I also appreciated that Cantor left Emma with more growing still to do, just as Austen does with her titular character in the original. And of course there’s George – sweet, noble, best friend George. Cantor does a great job of making him his own, layered character while also staying true to the man he’s modeled after and his role in Emma’s life.
Bottom Line: The Code for Love and Heartbreak is a light, sweet, really cute read about friendship, falling in love, and being comfortable in your own skin. Its similarities to Austen’s Emma are noticeable without being overdone, while also retaining its own distinct identity and flair. There’s not a lot of unnecessary-to-the-story drama, which I appreciated given the high level of unnecessary drama in our current world – sometimes it’s nice to just sit down and read a story that makes you smile. And that’s exactly what Cantor’s latest did for me!
(I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book)
I was excited to read this story, but a bit scared due to this being a new-to-me author. I’ll admit it was a slow-starter for me. I liked the writing and the characters, even felt a connection with them. But, most likely because of me not having a history with this author, I wasn’t quite trusting the story was going to go where it needed to go. In hindsight, I wish I would have just relaxed and went along for the ride. So, I’m here to tell you to relax and enjoy instead of fretting. You’ll appreciate the story all the more for it.
From the blurb and the premise of this story, it’s obvious Emma and George are supposed to fall for one another. I definitely felt a spark with these two, but that’s where also where I had my problems in the beginning. I didn’t feel the author was giving them enough one on one time for the story to go where it needed to go. Again, this was my own issue. The author, it turns out, knew what the heck she was doing if I would just leave her alone already! Their relationship unfolded just as it needed to, not how I was trying to force it to in my own mind.
Along with George and Emma, we have the rest of the Coding Club. All wonderful characters that help the reader to see how Emma’s brain ticks. They also were a catalyst for Emma to learn to open up a bit and get out of her own bubble. They are all quite patient with her, but I think George really is the only one who truly understands Emma. I loved watching the growth Emma had throughout this story. I found myself becoming quite protective of her and crying for her confusion and pain when things started falling apart.
As a huge Jane Austen fan, I have to say I love that this story is a nod to Emma. Which I didn’t realize before I started reading, even with the main character being Emma Woodhouse. Is it any surprise George’s last name is Knightley?
I look forward to reading more by this author in the future. And next time, I’ll know to trust her and just enjoy the journey.
**I received an ARC of this book courtesy of Net Galley and the publisher. All opinions expressed in this review are my own and given freely**
The Code for Love and Heartbreak is a new YA contemporary romance and Emma retelling with a friends to lovers trope. I personally have never read Emma before (hides in shame) but I adored this book and devoured it in one sitting. I wonder if I would have loved it even more if I had read the classic it is a retelling of.
Emma is not good when it comes to boys, feelings or people in general. Her obliviousness at how those around her are feeling at times made me uncomfortable for her. This at times made her come off cold and mean but since we are reading this through her POV we know that not actually the case. She has plenty of feelings she just doesn’t know how to express them. I think one of the reason I really liked her character was that she was so flawed but not in a way that made me dislike her. Bonus she loves mushroom olive pizza and that’s a fantastic pizza combo, I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise lol
Next up character wise we have George who is pretty much her only and best friend and the opposite of her when it comes to people. They are both total nerds and proud, but he’s much better at interacting with their classmates. George was absolutely precious and I couldn’t help but sigh every time he tried to show Emma how he felt and OMG his big declaration at the end made my nerd loving heart exploded !
The main plot of the story is Emma and the Coding Club writing and perfecting the code for a matchmaking app for their high school. At first, I thought this might not be enough to carry the story along but it definitely was. Emma’s person growth was at times awkward but entertaining. Plus with all the other members of the Code Club, who in my opinion stood as strong characters themselves, I was invested in how their individual character arcs were going to turn out.
Overall, I loved every moment of The Code for Love and Heartbreak and look forward to reading more books by Jillian Cantor in the future. When I went to write my review I was set on 4 but now that I’ve written it and thought about how much I enjoyed this one, so I’m moving it up to 5
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. Thank you to Inkyard Press, Netgalley and the author for an early review copy!