A Phantom Enchantment

Emma has been looking forward to spending her senior year of high school in Paris. When she arrives, she and her friend Elise are excited to learn the culture and participate in an Opera writing competition.  Then Flynn and Owen show up in Paris and the conflict heats up.

Elise doesn’t want to miss the opportunity to date a cute French boy, but she also doesn’t want to give up Owen.

Then Emma’s boyfriend, Gray, goes missing and is presumed dead. Emma travels through a mirror and is able to talk to Gray, but the Gray in her dreams is dangerous and depressing. In an attempt to get over Gray, Emma begins spending more time with Owen. Soon Emma must face Elise’s jealousy and her own growing attraction to Owen.

As Emma’s dreams continue to frighten her, she decides to stay away from the mirror, but that doesn’t stop her from feeling Gray’s presence. And then a series of accidents makes Emma wonder if Gray’s Ghost wants revenge.

Although A Phantom Enchantment takes place in Paris, the setting does not add to the story. So much of the story revolves around Emma and her American friends, that the French culture takes a backseat to the teen drama. Even though Emma and Elise are in a Paris boarding school, none of the French students make more than a ripple in the story.

Even though the story parallels the Phantom of the Opera, this also does not add to the enjoyment of the story. By the time Emma’s story reaches book three, both her story and conflict feel old. Thus, reading A Phantom Enchantment became a chore, and Emma’s story came to a welcome end.

Sexual Content

• Emma and her boyfriend talk about a night they spent on the beach and she asks, “You mean the night we almost had sex?”
• A drunk Flynn sleeps in Emma’s bed. The next morning he wakes up concerned that they had sex, and he didn’t remember it.
• Emma thinks about Owen who had his heart broken when Michelle, “revealed that she was gay. Then I led him on by kissed him, and worse by kissing Flynn a couple months later.”
• Emma wishes she could be, “more like Elise, sampling cute men as one might sample macarons.”
• Owen leans close to Emma. “He wanted me to be the one to initiate. He wanted me to want more. And I did…as difficult as it was not to press my body into Owen’s and kiss him hard on the mouth, I drew away.”
• Elise tells Emma, “I know you were probably saving yourself for Gray . . . I just want to remind you that you’re human. And you’ll never be this young and hot again.” Elise tells Emma to, “wear something sexy, and try to get lucky.”
• Else worries that she will become unfaithful like her mother, who cheated on her husband.
• Emma and Owen kiss and she was, “dazed by the feel of his tongue in my mouth, dizzy from the sheer cinematic splendor of it.”
• Emma and Owen make out. “I was a puddle of sensation, letting his mouth crash over me like a tide…We didn’t’ actually have sex-neither of us had prepared for this-but it didn’t matter. The end result felt the same as we lay in bed next to each other, nearly naked and spend, feeling desire twine though our limbs.”

Violence

• The book refers to the storyline of Phantom of the Opera and how, “a scene changer had been found dead in a cellar, hanging from a beam.”
• A Christmas tree falls and hurts Elise and Owen. Emma wonders if Gray’s ghost had something to do with the accident.
• Gray pins Emma against the wall and yells, “You know what fucking happened to me!” He makes it clear that he would like to have sex with her, but she is unwilling. Gray ends up leaving.
• A character talks about how he set fire to a girl’s room because he was jealous that she was with another man.

Drugs and Alcohol

• There are several scenes where the characters are seen drinking and are drunk.
• Flynn dreams of smoking pot in front of Jim Morrison’s grave, so Emma and Owen go with him so he can fulfill his dream. Although Emma does not smoke pot, Owen does.

Language

• One of the male characters had, “to take a piss.”
• Elise says that she has been “a bitch lately” and then apologizes. She also call another student a “douche.”
• Gray yells, “Well, love is (a joke). The fairytales tell you otherwise, but it’s all bullshit. Happily ever after is a fucking lie.”
• Profanity is scattered throughout the book. The profanity used includes: holy shit, Oh my god, smartass, and bastard.

Supernatural

• Emma uses a voodoo spell to bind her and Gray together.
• Emma is able to send her spirit self though a mirror and interact with Gray who had been lost at sea. Several times in the story Emma thinks she can feel Gray’s presence following her.
• Several items go missing which is blamed on the Bastille Ghost.

Spiritual Content

• One of the characters is a practitioner of voodoo and a believer of spells.
• Emma prays to God, and she repeats a verse, “Dear Saint Anthony, please come around. Something’s lost that must be found.”
• Emma says, “Sometimes I wished I believed in God in that unequivocal way others did. While I did believe in a cosmic force that had played some role in our creation, I had no idea what form it took or how much it actually intervened in human endeavors.”