The Scent Keeper

The Scent Keeper is a novel published in 2019 by the American author Erica Bauermeister. It chronicles the story of Emmeline Hartfell, a young woman whose mysterious magician father raises her on a remote island, which he claims is enchanted. After indirectly causing her father’s death, Emmeline must reunite with a mother she does not remember while experiencing the tender joys and gentle sorrows of first love. The book fuses familiar elements of a fairy tale with the harder-edged documentarian realism of a coming-of-age story. A New York Times best seller, The Scent Keeper explores the dynamics of memory, specifically the powerful influence of scents on how the mind negotiates with the past. In learning about her parents, Emmeline receives difficult lessons about ruthless ambition, profound betrayal, heartbreaking failure, and calculated revenge, while opening up her vulnerable heart to the promise of love.

The study guide will use the 2020 first US paperback edition from St. Martin’s Griffin Publications.

Plot Summary

Young Emmeline Hartfell lives with her father on a remote island outside Vancouver in the Pacific Northwest. Her father, John, was once a prominent scientist whose revolutionary investigations into the psychology of scents led to a prototype machine able to capture and contain aromas. At the urging of his wife Victoria, the machine, dubbed Nightingale, was rushed to market. Nightingale became a global sensation until the public learned that after only a few months the scents captured by the machine would fade. The company went bankrupt. Facing public ridicule and mounting lawsuits, John kidnapped his daughter and brought her to live on the island where he continues to conduct his experiments involving the preservation of scents.

Emmeline knows nothing of her father’s past. She lives a fairy tale life, believing mermaids bring them supplies and living day to day enthralled by her father’s lab where, with the help of his redesigned machine, he carefully catalogues and bottles all the scents on the island. Her father preserves the scents on thin tiny strips of paper. As she grows older, Emmeline develops a remarkably keen sense of smell. Meanwhile, her father grows more remote as he obsesses over perfecting the machine.

One day, on a walk to the lagoon where her father told her never to go, Emmeline happens to see a boat land and a man she does not know drop boxes of supplies on the beach. She knows now her father lied to her about the mermaids. Confused and hurt, she begins to quietly secret the bottles of scents to a cliff overlooking the sea where she throws the bottles into the water. When she is down to the last bottle, her father discovers what she is doing. In a vain effort to retrieve the last bottle from the churning waters, the father leaps to his death from the cliff.

Upset over her complicity in her father’s death, Emmeline is taken from the island by the man who brought them supplies. Henry and his wife Colette bring Emmeline to Secret Cove, a nearby fishing town where they run a small and not-terribly-profitable summer resort. Sheltered her entire life on the island, Emmeline tries to adjust to this new world. The couple adopt Emmeline and enroll her in the local school. They enlist her help in fixing up the resort, which Emmeline does happily. She is grateful that the couple have taken her in. Meanwhile, the kids at school are unkind, and Emmeline, who struggles in all her classes except science, is the butt of many jokes. She finds a friend in a quiet boy named Fisher, another misfit whose father is a fisherman. As the friendship between the two deepens into young love, Emmeline learns that Fisher’s father, a deeply frustrated and unhappy man, regularly beats both Fisher and his mother. She cannot bring herself to tell Fisher about her role in her father’s death.

Using the Internet connection in the school’s library, Emmeline finally learns about her father and his failed company. She also learns about her mother Victoria, who according to websites now runs Inspire, a perfume empire in nearby Vancouver. Inspire specializes in concocting expensive individually tailored scents for businesses interested in using subliminal tactics to boost sales.

After an explosive confrontation with his father, Fisher runs away to Vancouver. Emmeline, her heart devastated, leaves a note for her adoptive parents and soon follows with only the money she earned working at the resort. In the city, Emmeline desperately searches greenhouse nurseries; Fisher, she knows from his letters, works at one of them. But even living frugally on her savings, she soon faces a bleak prospect. Desperate, she looks up her mother at Inspire’s headquarters. Her mother embraces Emmeline and welcomes her into her life. Emmeline moves in to her mother’s posh penthouse and is quickly placed in the company as scent designer. Within weeks, Emmeline, who has inherited her father’s keen sense of smell, designs several scents that are successfully launched. She stills searches for Fisher and happens to find him working as a bartender in an upscale bar. The two are reunited and reignite their love. Fisher is living in a floating houseboat community of the homeless. Understanding now what Fisher means to her, Emmeline at last shares her darkest secret: She was responsible for her father’s death.

When Emmeline meets a friend of her father’s now working at Inspire, she begins to understand that her mother is just using her daughter’s skills to market bigger and more expensive perfumes. Moreover, Victoria was instrumental in her father’s failed Nightingale venture years earlier, and now she is bitter and vindictive. Deciding they have only each other, Emmeline and Fisher return to Secret Cove to begin their life together. Years later, Emmeline, now pregnant, shares her story with her unborn child.