Emmett

Emmett Woodhouse is nearly eighteen, and he has plenty going for him: he is good-looking, sharp, wealthy, and comfortable at home, with a cheerful outlook on life. Knowing how fortunate he is, he tries to give something back through charity work and by being kind to people who are not always easy to like, such as Georgia, whom he lets sit at his lunch table even though she can be irritating. His newest project is matchmaking, which has gone well so far, since he helped his best friend Taylor find happiness with her new boyfriend.

When Harrison, Emmett's occasional friend with benefits, announces that he wants a boyfriend, Emmett, who has no interest in being anyone's boyfriend, decides to find Harrison the perfect match among the students at Highbury Academy, a candy-colored private school just outside Los Angeles. Emmett's childhood friend Miles, who is straight, thinks choosing a boyfriend for someone you sleep with is a bad plan. Emmett argues that in gay life, friends, lovers, and boyfriends all come from the same very small pool.

Emmett avoids dating for a reason. He believes the human brain does not finish developing until twenty-five, so any relationship he starts before then would probably end in a breakup and a loss. He has seen what loss does to people: his mother died four years ago, and his father has never really been the same.

As he works on Harrison's match, the boundaries Emmett has drawn turn out to be less firm than he believes, and he begins to suspect that, however talented he is at arranging other people's lives, he may not understand love at all. A modern, openly gay take on Jane Austen's Emma, the novel has a self-assured lead who is sure he knows everything, an occasional nod to the film Clueless, and a look at queer culture, where friends and lovers can overlap in complicated ways.