Yerba Buena

Yerba Buena is an exquisitely written, slow-paced coming of age story about Emilie and Sara.The writing is quiet, soft, and intimate. It slowly draws you in and lulls you into a security of seeing these two characters as they adapt and cope as they come together and discover who they really are.The characters are flawed and open, honestly portraying the human ability to adapt and cope with adversity and the tough decisions life throws at you.The story is heartbreaking and intense, as we get to know and understand these two women through these character driven pages. Each page is fuelled by suspense as you long to discover how and when these characters will come together, always with an undertone of knowing it might not work the way you're hoping for.A beautiful, raw, and honest literary fiction full of passion and unadulterated humanity.

This book had me reading until too late, leaking tears. Vividly written, heartbreaking and healing, lovely and brutal - it's a wonderful way to spend time and will stay with me.

I was sucked into this book instantly because of the punchy writing style. There are lots of short sentences that create a really good rhythm and what's even better, I cared about the characters right off the bat. It was a little hard at the beginning to remember who was who, as you had to remember not just these two girls but also the names of the side characters in each half of the story.The blurb is trying to sell this as a romance, so you would expect the two characters to meet early on in the novel, but they don't. As a result, you spend approximately 50% of the book waiting for these two stories to converge and when they do, the relationship seems a little bit insta-love. I found it harder to care then, because this is a situation that I can't personally relate to, but I think it depends on the reader's own background and experiences how they will feel about this character dynamic.After this fateful meeting, the second half of the book was a little less interesting and I am not sure if this was the author's intention, but we see a couple of scene where these characters, even at the pinnacle of their love story do not communicate very well. I'm not entirely sure that a relationship could remain strong when one of the characters is forced to go no-contact for a period of time quite early on (I thought that this was for a month, but it's later mentioned in the text that it was actually two).Overall this was a great read with a very strong sense of visual, almost cinematic, where the masterful descriptions of spaces and colour really brought these locations and atmospheres to life.Also as far as themes are concerned, people looking for queer stories that are not *about* queerness will be very satisfied with this book.

Nina LaCour’s sprawling narrative shifts between two women, stretching out over the course of years from their girlhood to their late twenties. Emilie and Sara are from fractured families, Creole Emilie’s childhood’s been scarred by the fallout from her sister’s drug addiction, Sara is recovering from a series of immense, life-altering losses. Lacour shifts between their perspectives as their experiences slowly bring them together, until the moment they meet in a fashionable LA restaurant, Yerba Buena. I really wanted to like this one but I was never really caught up in the story or convinced by the incidents that shaped the central characters’ development. The pacing’s unusually uneven, slow then fast then slow, skipping forward over a number of years then detailing the action of a few days. I also found the intensely traumatic events that marked the beginnings of Sara’s journey too much to take in, and the way they’re dealt with much too superficial.The whole novel’s packed with difficult, potentially challenging material from drugs to prostitution to sexual abuse to possible murder, not to mention work and college affairs, cancer and divorce - there’s enough here for two books not one. But too often a situation was introduced in a way that made it feel like an easy, annoyingly manipulative, plot point. There was no sense of any deeper exploration or of the actual impact these circumstances might have on the individuals caught up in them. That said there were moments that worked really well: the style’s more than reasonable; there are numerous lyrical descriptive passages; and aspects of Emilie’s plotline were quite promising and absorbing. But I’m not really sure what this was actually supposed to be: a social issue novel; a lesbian love story or a lifestyle one; a conventional ‘healing’ narrative; a mystery; or an examination of toxic family legacies and smalltown horrors. There was an awkward restlessness to the whole undertaking; too much tension between the plot, characterisations and settings; a disjointedness; oodles of “tell” not that much “show”. This is LaCour’s first adult novel, so some of the problems may relate to that, and I’d be interested to see what she does next, but this one just didn’t really work for me. That said there are a lot of extremely positive reviews elsewhere on this site, so maybe I just wasn’t the right reader for this one.