Everyone she interacts with struck me as far too cavalier about situations and relationships which should elicit strong emotional reactions. Rather than slowly turning up the heat, LaCour merely drops the frog into boiling water, leaving the reader without any time to become invested.Įmilie’s story, while more digestible than Sara’s, still left me cold and distant. Sara’s story, although it has a more immediate hook, is much more difficult to connect with-the things she does and the things that happen to her, while not necessarily unrealistic, escalate and accelerate to the point where they become absurd. They circle like stars in orbit around one another until inevitably colliding. Yerba Buena follows two characters: Sara, who runs away from home with a boy named Grant after the death of her girlfriend, and Emilie, who has no distinguishing characteristics that I can recall. It’s the latter! Yerba Beuna maintains everything I loved about the writing in We Are Okay…unfortunately, almost nothing else here works, and in this case, the writing style actively undermines rather than reinforces the characters and story. I was very much looking forward to Nina LaCour’s adult debut after being enraptured by the lyrical prose and melancholy tone of We Are Okay-I wasn’t sure if that mood was specific to that book, or if it was just LaCour’s style. I received an ARC of Yerba Buena from Flatiron Books in exchange for an honest review.
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