Emma Woodhouse is twenty-one, extremely rich, extremely clever, and entirely too confident in her ability to manage other people's lives. In the wealthy Atlanta suburb of Highbury, she is the social sun everyone orbits. When her governess-companion leaves to get married, Emma takes up a project: transforming Harriet Smith, her sweet, uncertain new friend, into a match-ready social asset. She is going to be spectacularly, instructively wrong in every direction — about Harriet, about everyone around her, and most humiliatingly about herself and the one person who has known her well enough, for long enough, to see it happening in real time.
