Yerba Buena by Nina LeCour is a contemporary love story that blends family relationships, past mistakes and emotional discovery, resulting in a beautiful novel of heartbreak, forgiveness and enduring love. Emilie and Sara's relationship is honest, at times painfully raw, but above all believable, and LaCour writes with confidence, deftly navigating her characters through the challenges of modern life.

First of all, the cover is stunning! There are some beautiful passages of writing in this novel and the descriptions of Yerba Buena, the restaurant were excellent - I really wanted to eat and drink there. It's a pleasant read but for me the characterisation was rushed and shallow which prevented me from fully connecting to the characters and the instant attraction between Sara and Emilie.

In short, it's the story of two women finding their way in the world. With all the hardship and struggles life has to offer.

I really enjoy Nina LaCour’s writing and how developed and real her characters feel. It makes every scene involving grief and loss hit that much harder and every joyous moment that more meaningful.

Getting to know Sara, Emilie and the various people that shaped their lives along the way was great. And although I got confused by the time jumps once or twice it was interesting to read about all the obstacles life tossed at them and how they got together in the end. Which makes me sad to say that their chemistry somehow fell flat for me.

Nevertheless the author hits truths that are (or at least should be) our core desires in life. From our basic desires to be loved to everybody wanting to find their place in the world and belong but also our fear and subsequent desire for someone to see us at our worst and choose to be there in spite of it.

And now I definitely want to plant Yerba Buena [Clinopodium douglasii] in my garden.

I loved this book so much! The prose was hauntingly beautiful and the characters realistic and vulnerable.

It felt real in a way books seldom do, I could picture Sara and Emilie in my head, somewhere in this world. Living, hurting, loving. Even though there a lot of dark themes dealt with in this story (please check trigger warnings before you read, especially if you're not currently in a good place mentally), but still everything felt so soft. The writing, the places, the people. The hard things as well.

This story is at times nostalgic, always bittersweet, always fleeting. And the ending, to me, was perfect and real. The true ending of a story like this, of people like Sara and Emilie.

This is not a romance in the traditional publishing sense, but it is a love story. And it is beautiful.

Also, a moment please for this gorgeous, gorgeous cover that captures the essence of the book perfectly!

(Thank you to NetGalley, Nina LaCour and Hodder & Stoughton, Coronet for providing me with an eARC for this book in exchange for my honest feedback. All opinions in this review are my own.)

Full of tenderness and underlying pain, much as we've come to expect from Nina LaCour. It was certainly written beautifully and kept me intrigued. I particularly wanted to know what was going on in Sara's past, and how she'd heal from the hardship. But it was missing that spark for me. Maybe it just never goes deep enough. I never ended up caring as much as I should have and that's the one thing I wouldn't expect with this author. Diverting and layered but nothing stuck with me.

Thank you to Netgalley for providing the ARC.

This would have been a 5 star l, but I felt like it was lacking something. Some depth maybe? But I really enjoyed LaCour's writing style and I would definitely like to read more of her work. As cliché as it is to say, the vibes were brilliant. I actually want to try Yerba Buena now.

Yerba Buena by Nina LaCour is a gorgeous, haunting, uplifting and depressing book and I loved it! Following Sara and Emilie on their way to find each other is as beautiful as it is sad. This story shows life at it's rawest, We are following two girls who try to make the most of their lives and watch them fall in and out of Lust/Love, we watch them succeed and fail and we watch them being so incredibly human, that it makes you think about your own life and where you might have taken the right or wrong turn. In the end, all the turns - right and wrong - bring these girls to where they need to be. And it gives my hopes for my own wild parkour of life.

5/5 stars.

Yerba Buena follows two young women, Sara and Emilie, in a side-by-side narrative over multiple years, watching them as they eventually meet and later form a relationship. It is not only a love story, but a story about family, loss, and personal histories. I, for one, absolutely loved it.

Let's start with Nina LaCour's prose: it is, to me, absolutely gorgeous. I love the way she describes places over the course of the novel, the way she expertly writes emotions, relationships and, of course, people. Yerba Buena is not extremely plot heavy, but for me the in-depth exploration and development of complex characters more than makes up for that. All the relationships in the novel were brilliantly thought out, from romantic relationships, to sibling relationships, to familial relationships, to friendships, and I loved how they grew and developed over the novel. I loved Sara and Emilie's relationship, of course, but I also liked how it didn't dominate the novel, and how other relationships were given room to grow and flourish. I felt as though I knew the two main characters so well by the end of the book, and I still find myself thinking of them often – they truly do both deserve the world.

I had to read this novel twice to form a review, and even now I can't quite get my thoughts together, instead I want to read it again and again, to live with the characters for longer and never let them go. The book is a love letter to art and design, to food and drink, but above all to human connection, and I know it will stick with me for years to come.

*I was given an eARC of this book by Netgalley and the publishers in exchange for an honest review.*

Content warnings: prostitution, drug abuse + mentions of overdoses, child sexual abuse, divorce, death of a parent.

This is the most gorgeous book. I started this morning and abandoned all my responsibilities to keep reading it. It’s so beautifully written (which is no surprise because Nina Lacour is a beautiful writer) but it’s also sad and romantic and sexy, about love and loss and family and finding yourself and your place in the world. I adored it.

Yerba Buena follows two women over the course of their childhood to their late twenties. Sara Foster runs away from home at sixteen to leave the losses behind her that have shattered her ability to trust and be intimate with others. Years later, she is a sought-after bartender in Los Angeles, as much renowned for her concoctions as the air of mystery surrounding her and her past. Across the city, Emily Dubois is struggling to get started with her future. In her seventh year and fifth major as an undergraduate, she years for beauty and community her Creole grandparents cultivated but can’t find it in herself to commit – to anything or anyone. Impulsively, she decides to take on a job arranging flowers for the glamorous restaurant Yerba Buena – where Sara works. When the two women catch sight of each other, their connection is immediate. But the baggage both women carry is heavy and the universe has a way of cutting them off right when they’re about to connect time and again. When Sara’s old life comes calling just when Emilie and her have found their way to each other, it’s up to them to figure out whether their love is enough to leave their pasts in the dust.
Yerba Buena isn’t easily categorized. For me, it turned out to be nothing like I expected and yet held me captive for the entirety of the book. At times, Yuerba Buena read like a reluctant memoir, at others almost like an exorcism of ghosts of the past that haunted the characters.
In this slice of life narrative, we follow two women who ostensibly have nothing in common and yet somehow fit together perfectly. LaCour takes her time to establish both Sara and Emilie as flawed, relatable and lovable characters that you immediately begin to root for. Both Emilie and Sara have got their own struggles but their connection with each other is palpable from their very first chance encounter. Yet they both are faced time and again with the question whether love – real, unconditional love – is enough to make them leave their ghosts in the past. Anyone who’s ever been haunted by their mistakes, their losses or their regrets will surely feel connected to these women.
Ultimately, what drew me to this book was that, as much as it seems to be about star-crossed lovers, it really focused more on trauma and grief. There is an intimacy to how LaCour depicts what happens to Sara and Emilie – and much of this story is what happens to the characters until they finally realize their own agency and try to get out of the harmful and toxic situations they keep finding themselves in. It felt affirming to read about two women who also can’t help but fall into these traps that we’ve all encountered in life and struggle with finding their way out – there are no perfect characters here, everyone is flawed, moral compasses are askew and it just perfectly worked together with LaCour’s storytelling. Both Sara and Emilie go through different journeys and emotional reprieves are few and fleeting. Though you kind of guess that they’ll cross paths again, you’re always left wondering what else the universe has got in store for them, which compelled me to keep reading. Weaving their tales together toward the end of the book almost felt cathartic.
What I really enjoyed about Yerba Buena was how it showed you how transient everything in life is only to follow it up with something that left a permanent impression you can’t really put into words. LaCour brings this ineffable feeling to every topic discussed in the story – from the depiction of grief to child neglect to missing loved ones and the deep abyss of depression. Yet the story also delivers moments of happiness, of inner strength, of taking yourself out of a harmful situation and, most of all, persevering when life tries to get you down again and again. It’s a masterfully crafted story that at times flows and ebbs like the sea – meaning that sometimes the pacing felt like a Monday that never ends and at others raced the clock when you’re late for an appointment you already don’t feel like going to. It’s a story that essentially shows that no matter how hard or messy life gets, you can always get up one more time. Its heavy themes are explored in excruciating detail but if you’re up for it, I’m sure you’ll fall in love with this heartbreaking yet rewarding story.
A true slice of life narrative, Nina La Cour’s adult debut Yuerba Buena is a story of love and loss, family and friendship, of two women finding their way in the world – and each other. At times brutally honest and at others comforting and intimate, this story is perfect for anyone who has ever been kicked down by life only to get up time and again.

A story of love, loss, heartbreak, family & friendship. A story that shows you can rise up no matter how messy and downright awful life can get.

I struggled with this book at first but once I got passed the first couple of chapters I flew through it! With a whole cast of characters - not all likeable - I was pulled into the lives of Sara & Emilie.

I love when a book has a dual perspective, and even more so when the story spans years. Starting out when they’re teenagers, the books follows Sara & Emilie over decades of their lives into adulthood, and the messy years in between. With each encounter the two women had I was hoping they’d find a way to stay together (no spoilers!)

TW: death, drugs/addiction

Thank you NetGalley for the earc in exchange for an honest review

Yerba Buena is told in third person from the perspectives of Sara and Emilie. Sara runs away from home at sixteen after her girlfriend Annie dies. She runs away to Los Angeles and years later is a bartender. Emilie is in her seventh year as an undergraduate after breaking up with her professor girlfriend Olivia. She takes a job flower arranging at Yerba Buena and begins an affair with the married owner Jacob. Sara sees Emilie at Yerba Buena and months later they embark on a relationship. I have enjoyed Nina LaCour's previous young adult novel We Are Okay so I was expecting to love this. This is definitely less of a romance and more of a literary fiction novel. I was not expecting the heavy themes of this novel and was shocked at the beginning. The writing does take you away though and it felt very lyrical to me, This would have been a four star but I am lowering it to three because It felt long to me even though it is only 304 pages. Things were happening but not much happened at the same time. Spoiler - TW - There was a sexual act done at age 16 with her Father's friend for money.

If I could pick my favorite thing about Yerba Buena, it would be the writing. It's simple and understated, even comforting and gentle somehow, despite the heavier themes it tackled. I enjoyed how beautifully descriptive it was and how the author was able to capture emotions on the page.

My relationship with the characters had a harder start. At first, the POV changes confused me, and I had a hard time keeping track of who was who. As someone in her earlier twenties — I definitely found them relatable, especially Emilie. They felt real and human, the way they made questionable choices sometimes, the way they felt. I found myself becoming more interested in them and being more invested in their stories.

Speaking of being invested — this is both a good thing and a bad thing, I think, but the switches between POV got longer as we go through the book, and whenever a switch did happen, it felt jarring. I got too immersed in the previous POV and was like "oh, what?" when we moved to the next character.

For me, the first half was better than the second, and the ending could have been stronger. Still, this was an enjoyable read for me — bittersweet and hopeful, and one that I believe many will enjoy.

I didn't think I could ever read a Nina Lacour book and feel... absolutely nothing. Her writing is always so atmospheric and full of emotion. But sadly, I felt none of that with this book and I just didn't... care, about any of it.

Nine LaCour has written a fantastic and breathtaking book that I will be recommending to my friends and family alike. Such an amazing read

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.

My rating: 5/5 stars

“In the silence that followed she realized how badly she wanted to have been told a story. She craved the arc of it, the beginning and middle and end. She craved a moral, a meaning, something she could mull over in the dark.”

If you know me, or have been following my reviews for a while now, it’s going to come as no surprise that I’ve yet again fallen wholeheartedly and unapologetically in love with yet another Nina Lacour novel. I feel deeply honoured and slightly inadequate to be able to write one of the first reviews for one of my all-time-favourite authors newest release. Then again, there’s only one message that I truly want to get across to you, and here it is:

Nina Lacour writes grief, coming of age and the bittersweet journey of finding your place in the world after hardship like nobody else. It’s simple, visceral, understated and an arrow straight into the softest part of my heart. I’ve shed plenty a tear over Watch Over Me and We Are Okay, all of them that magical cocktail of salt, sorrow and substantiation. My experience with Yerba Buena was no different, and I wouldn’t want it any other way. If you’ve drank the bittersweet tonic of Lacour before, then Yerba Buena will be a familiar comfort. If you’ve never experienced that feeling I’ve just described: this is your chance to have your first taste.

Synopsis:
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. Years later, she’s built a tentative new balance for herself, working as a bartender in the glamorous restaurant Yerba Buena, and making a name for herself with her brilliantly layered cocktails.
Here she crosses paths with Emily Dubois, who’s been in a holding pattern; in her seventh year and fifth major as an undergraduate, making some extra money creating floral arrangements for Yerba Buena. Above all, she yearns for the beauty and community her Creole grandparents cultivated but is unable to commit.
The two embark on a tentative journey together, leading to a relationship that is as bittersweet and strong as the herb the restaurant is named after.

Many thanks to Flatiron Book and the author for providing me with an early copy of the book in exchange for an honest review. You guys have set a high barre for any book that hopes to be my favourite of 2022.

This is a beautiful and deeply feeling novel, and a fantastic adult debut for Nina LaCour! Sara and Emilie seemed like such intriguing dichotomies of each other, the way they were both hurting over their families in different yet oddly similar ways gave their connect a much deeper feeling and a great emotional aspect and range. following these two as they find their way in life and what they want felt so personal, and the characters felt very real - almost as though you were seeing the journey of a friend. this novel is simple in some ways, but that doesn’t diminish how lovely and emotional a read it was.

I liked the story telling and would read more from this author. I particularly enjoyed the use of storytelling though various senses. The description of food and drink, plants and materials and linking them to memories made the experience quite visceral. There is a fair amount of self-discovery and growth of the two main characters as they work through their traumatic experiences and pain. My only complaint is that I sometimes become confused about who certain supporting characters where were and who they were connected to as so many were mentioned.

Yerba Buena is a book. By which I mean, I read it, but I didn’t really feel any particularly strong way about it. It’s Nina LaCour! I was expecting to love this! But in the end? It was a book. That’s about all I can say.

Part of this may just be I was expecting something of a different book than I got, for whatever reason (I don’t even remember why anymore). What it turned out to be was a genre that I… don’t dislike, per se, but isn’t my favourite. And even Nina LaCour couldn’t save me then.

This is a book of very little plot. It’s about two women’s lives as they slowly trudge forwards onto the point at which they meet. That’s it. Now, of all the authors, you might have thought Nina LaCour could still make that interesting. I thought it too. And yet.

It’s kind of hard to say just what was the issue here. The writing was as beautiful as usual, with LaCour. That wasn’t it. Perhaps it was the combination of the lack of plot (a fact which could have been forgiven but for this next bit) and the sheer blandness of the characters. It’s only been two days since I read this and yet I cannot tell you a thing of note about them. They slipped from my mind as soon as I finished the book. I barely even remember their names.

This, ultimately, is my lasting impression of the book—if you can even call it that. It’s forgettable. It’s 300 pages of somewhat diverting reading, but nothing sticks. Which is probably the most disappointing part of the book. I could have stood it if it had been memorable, if not great.

But instead, this.