They make impulsive choices as well as smart ones. Emilie and Sara get tangled in messy relationships-romantic, platonic and familial. Along the way, LaCour captures all the aches and hurts and betrayals and sensual delights of being in your 20s. It’s a layered story about the process of learning to love yourself, of holding onto and letting go of painful history, and of building your own home. They spend one meaningful night together, but it’s a long time before they connect again. She doesn’t feel at ease in her family, as she’s still grieving the loss of the closeness she used to share with her sister.Įmilie and Sara meet at a restaurant where Sara tends bar and Emilie arranges flowers.

She’s not sure what she wants, so she flits from major to major in college, and then from job to job. Pushing aside the traumas of her past, she begins to make a life for herself in Los Angeles.Įmilie is an LA native struggling with more nebulous challenges.

When her girlfriend dies suddenly, Sara seizes the first opportunity to run.

From one seemingly ordinary scene to the next, the relentless momentum of our imperfect, chaotic lives pulses through LaCour’s prose.Īt 16, Sara is desperate to flee her small hometown on Northern California’s Russian River and get far away from her difficult childhood, her drug-dealing father and memories of her dead mother. It unfolds without any fanfare through a series of intimate and brilliantly observed details about growing up and into yourself. Longtime fans of Nina LaCour’s teen novels will be enchanted by the quietly powerful Yerba Buena, her first book for adult readers.

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