Chapter by chapter, she switches between perspectives to craft a quiet love story about two young women in Southern California who are figuring out what it means to build a home and to choose to invite someone to share in it. This, too, is how Nina LaCour, who won a Printz Award for her young adult literature, weaves together her first adult novel. As Sara and her brother watched, “their father moved his pencil, faint lines that turned - as if by magic - into places and things they recognized.” Suddenly, there it was: an entire world, familiar yet strange, and within it, a story. Each person in turn would begin to sketch, slowly building the scene. They started with a blank piece of paper. When Sara's old life catches up to her, upending everything she thought she wanted just as Emilie has finally gained her own sense of purpose, they must decide if their love is more powerful than their pasts.Īt once exquisite and expansive, astonishing in its humanity and heart, Yerba Buena is a love story for our time and a propulsive journey through the lives of two women finding their way in the world.When Sara, one of the protagonists in “Yerba Buena,” was a girl, she and her family used to play a game. But the damage both women carry, and the choices they have made, pulls them apart again and again.

When Sara catches sight of Emilie one morning at Yerba Buena, their connection is immediate. On a whim, she takes a job arranging flowers at the glamorous restaurant Yerba Buena and embarks on an affair with the married owner. In her seventh year and fifth major as an undergraduate, she yearns for the beauty and community her Creole grandparents cultivated but is unable to commit. Across the city, Emilie Dubois is in a holding pattern. Years later, in Los Angeles, she is a sought-after bartender, renowned as much for her brilliant cocktails as for the mystery that clings to her. When Sara Foster runs away from home at sixteen, she leaves behind not only the losses that have shattered her world but the girl she once was, capable of trust and intimacy. The debut adult novel by the bestselling and award-winning YA author Nina LaCour, following two women on a star-crossed journey toward each other

Yerba buena a novel