What works best for LaCour in YA writing works against her, to some extent, in “Yerba Buena.” The author understands what it takes for a character to mature. They’re each talented and resourceful and almost impossible to tell apart, and not because they’re both young women: It’s because they’re unspecific. You can feel their attraction to each other, but you can’t see them as individuals (this may in fact be an obstacle to their union).

The trouble with LaCour’s approach is that it takes a while for Sara and Emilie to come completely alive, even though their creator clearly knows them so well. Nina LaCour’s new novel, “Everything Leads to You,” is a modern Los Angeles love story in which friendship and attraction cross lines of class, ethnicity and sexuality and where young people find real pleasure, drama and creative possibilities in work. These “unfinished” relationships provide a clue to where LaCour diverges from Waters the former is less interested in showing how a partner might provide strength and comfort in dark times than in examining why a partner might not always be the right idea.īooks Review: Nina Lacour’s ‘Everything Leads to You’ captures young love in L.A. Emilie’s sister Colette bounces in and out of rehab programs. Sara’s younger brother Spencer returns to her life after she guiltily abandoned him, then 5, to a neglectful father. Emilie’s Creole grandparents have kept their small family tight and loving - and traditional.īoth women have complicated siblings. Sara, who left home at 16 and worked her way up to the position of bartender at the popular restaurant Yerba Buena, first spots Emilie when she shows up to work as a floral designer there. Sara Foster and Emilie Dubois have wildly different backgrounds and interests. LaCour has been rightly celebrated for her young-adult novels about same-sex relationships, including “ Everything Leads to You,” “Hold Still” and “ The Disenchantments.” Now she brings her specific mix of realism and romance to an adult audience. Nina LaCour’s new novel, “ Yerba Buena,” comes closer to Waters than most in generating a feeling that might best be described as complete safety in an author’s hands you sense she understands her characters so well that you can sit back, sink in and trust the story. Some are truly great, others just OK, as with any category of books. Since Waters wrote “ Tipping the Velvet” and “ Fingersmith” there have been scores, if not hundreds, of lesbian writers whose books have changed lives. If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from, whose fees support independent bookstores.Īmong the pleasures of reading Sarah Waters’ groundbreaking novels is inhabiting a world of queer women who are not representatives of sexual identity but merely, gloriously, human.

Yerba buena a novel book review