The Forgotten Book

Emma is happy to be back at her German boarding school with its ancient castle and lovely grounds.  She's also happy to see her hypochondriac absent-minded father who is the school's headmaster.

She's spent the summer making plans to have successful school year, including making progress with her crush, Frederick, and starting a secret society.  But a visitor with no plans to leave causes some serious problems.  Darcy de Winter is a former student and some of the family who owns the property, which pretty much means they can't kick him out.  Emma would feel compassion for him since he's looking for clues about his missing sister, but he's just too awful.

But Emma has something else to distract her.  While cleaning out an unused room in the castle she finds a book.  It seems to be a chronicle of Stolzenburg castle written by different authors over the years.  At first, Emma is just interested in the story, but then she makes a startling discovery.  Anything she writes in the book comes true. 

At first writing in the book is fun, but then things start to go wrong.  Could the book have something to do with Darcy's missing sister?  Plus, she's spent years pining for Frederick, but now she's beginning to wonder about him, and the more time she spends with Darcy trying to unlock the mystery of his missing sister, the warmer her feelings become.

Many of the characters in Mechthild Glaser's book are taken from Pride and Prejudice and Emma by Jane Austen which is kind of fun, but it also takes a lot of the tension out of the story.  I've read modern updates of these stories that really work, but the relationship between Emma and Darcy just seems forced to me.  Darcy is ridiculously rude to everyone in the beginning of the book, and he's a twenty-year-old graduate.  Emma is a sixteen-year-old student with all the silliness and immaturity of a normal teenager.  That age gap alone is pretty creepy.  Plus, they have nothing in common.  The parallels work better for other characters, and I pleased to find that no one had to end up married to the Wickham character.

The mystery and supernatural elements of the story are the parts that work best.  I hate to say it, but I think this would have worked better without the Jane Austen angle.