Austen said of Emma Woodhouse that she was "going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like." Smith's iteration of the same character is not liked by anyone, not even the author, it seems. This modern Emma is given all of the original's faults and none of the original's charm, and is dropped into a story that meanders from event to event without much causation or character development (for example, there is a sequence of internal discussions on a character's musings of her sexual orientation and a brief nude scene which must clearly have been meant to titillate the reader, as they are later dropped entirely from the plot and never mentioned again). In short, disappointing.