With a Printz award and numerous bestsellers under her belt, LaCour has perfected her approach in ways that translate to adult literary fiction beautifully. YA and romance are both very technically demanding genres, with rigorous expectations for how backstory and foreshadowing should accumulate and how an ending should satisfy. It’s an impressive development upon LaCour’s already impressive genre training. Other plot concerns occupy the space and emotional attention, and upon the bedrock of the love story arises a beautiful narrative of two people healing their respective traumas and rebuilding their respective families alongside one another. It’s almost a vaporized love story, where the affinity and sympathy between these characters permeates everything without overwhelming the substance of the narrative. Watching these characters fall in love is magnificent. How did they get there, and where will their flirtation take them?

The two finally meet one day at a chic restaurant called Yerba Buena, where Emilie designs artful floral arrangements and where Sara is the enigmatic, watchful bartender. This double vision brings both characters into sharp emotional focus LaCour alternates these stories so that the reader slowly understands how Sara’s past brings her to Emilie’s present. Next, there is Emilie, the aimless twenty-something drifting through various college majors and part time jobs, looking for anything that offers her a sense of clarity, agency, and purpose. First, there is Sara, a heartbroken teenage runaway fleeing her small hometown in Northern California and reeling after the death of her first love Annie, living on the road and doing whatever it takes to make it to Los Angeles in one piece. Named for the herb (part of the mint family) that grows in thick and lush tangles, Yerba Buena intertwines two perspectives and two timelines. I started reading my early copy in the winter, when such warmth felt unimaginable, and revisiting now in celebration of its publication, I basked in it. Yerba Buena is Nina LaCour’s adult debut, but coming on the tails of an established and wildly successful YA career, this book sits at a unique point in LaCour’s body of work with both the freshness of an artistic departure and also the refinement of a triumphant mid-career masterpiece. Even until a couple weeks ago, it was gray and drizzly and cold, but if there was ever a novel for summer-ifying Portland, Yerba Buena is a warm glow of a book up for the task. The summer in Portland, OR has been late-blooming this year. The Autostraddle Encyclopedia of Lesbian Cinema.LGBTQ Television Guide: What To Watch Now.

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