Love, Longing, and the Messy Middle

Yerba Buena is about Emilie and Sara—two women whose lives don’t run parallel, like the clean lines of an eleven, but curve and double back like an R. They intersect, diverge, and haunt each other, so that long after you close the book, the story lingers in the quiet corners of your mind.

Emilie is searching for her passion, her restless energy suggesting that fulfillment is always one more decision away. A seven-year undergraduate, she changes majors—and jobs—with compulsive hope, chasing the next shiny possibility. Even when she finally earns a bachelor’s degree, satisfaction remains elusive. The search doesn’t end; it simply shape-shifts.

Sara, by contrast, never had the luxury of searching. At sixteen, she’s busy surviving—escaping a volatile family life that leaves no room for self-discovery, let alone dreams. Passion, if it exists, is buried beneath endurance.

When they meet, it’s anything but forgettable. A handshake that lasts a beat too long. A moment charged with recognition. In a restaurant where Sara consults on the bar menu and Emilie designs the florals, something sparks—quietly, insistently—and refuses to fade. Even when their lives pull them in different directions, that moment stays.

What binds Nina LaCour’s debut adult novel together is the complicated gravity between Emilie and Sara—once they stop tripping over their own damage and finally allow themselves to collide. This is not just a love story. It’s messy, tender, anxiety-inducing, and quietly devastating. It understands that love doesn’t arrive neatly packaged; it arrives bruised, hopeful, and human.

Yerba Buena is the messy middle—the part that makes everything else worth biting into. Without it, you don’t really have a sandwich at all.