“The Scentkeeper” by Erica Bauermeister

BAYOU PAGES | NIGHTSTANDS & COFFEE TABLES

REVIEW BY MEREDITH MCKINNIE

“When you change a scent, you change the memory.”

I read this book with my nose. This is a glorious love letter to the power of the senses, particularly smell and its connection to memory. Bauermeister writes eloquently about nature, emotion, and how a lack of reliance on societal structure can stimulate one’s reliance on the gifts provided us at birth. Emmeline has only known life on a remote island with her father. They live off the land and the sea, forage for food, and amuse themselves by observing nature and telling stories. Emmeline’s father teaches her about life by reading fairy tales. She is fascinated by the mermaids she is told that they leave little presents along the beach. She knows other people exist, but she has never seen them, and her father warns her about going near the beach to avoid being seen by drivers of small boats allowed in the channel periodically when the tide rises. As Emmeline grows older, she begins to question her life and why it only involves the two of them. 

Emmeline and her father live in a cabin reminiscent of the inhabitant dwellings in the fairy tales. One wall is covered in drawers which hold bottles sealed with wax. He protects the bottles and the treasures inside, little slips of paper with individual scents he has saved on a machine he keeps hidden on a top shelf in the cabin. He only takes the machine down to record a scent, quickly bottling the paper to reserve the original smell unaltered. Emmeline is both fascinated by her father’s obsession and intrigued about the secrecy around his process. When Emmeline’s curiosity results in an upheaval of their private world, she is thrust into a society she has never known and forced to rely on her keen senses to find out who she is and where she comes from. 

The first half of this book reads like a fairy tale the protagonist delves into. Emmeline is like a wildling, surviving in an archaic existence. She craves friendship, though she doesn’t really know what friendships are. She clings to the love of her father, as he is the only human she has ever known. This is a beautiful story of love, grief, and a girl coming of age in a world constantly shifting underneath her feet. Bauermeister has created a literary novel, one that unfolds slowly, with vivid descriptions and keen attention to detail. If you read Where the Crawdads Sing, by Delia Owens, this novel is quite similar in pace and character development. Both Owens and Bauermeister show an appreciation for the natural environment and characters whose identities are shaped by their physical surroundings. This book made me anxious to read more of Bauermeister’s work, which includes four other novels and two annotated collections of books for both women and little girls.