on
3.5/5
Non-Fiction
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Rating: 4/5
Pages: 304
Started: 19 May 2024
Finished: 21 May 2024
Summary:
After the suspicious death of her girlfriend, sixteen-year-old Sara ran away from her tiny town and her drug-dealer father to make a new life for herself in Los Angeles; years later, she's now a renowned bartender often hired out to build custom drink menus for high-end restaurants, including the restaurant Yerba Buena. Emilie is a perpetual undergrad student, working on her fifth major and arranging flowers at Yerba Buena on the side. Though Emilie and Sarah seem to inexplicably connect when they first meet at the restaurant, it isn't until years later--after Emilie starts flipping houses, after Sara's father is arrested and her younger brother comes to live with her--that their love story can begin in earnest.
Thoughts:
LaCour's writing style is growing on me quickly. It's very stilted at points, with lots of incomplete sentences, but now that I've gotten used to it, I enjoyed this novel so much. Though the slightly chaotic writing echoes the imperfect characters and slightly jagged plot, it all seems to fit together beautifully. LaCour's characters are not perfect, they do not fix their entire lives or apologize for their pasts or hold onto any guarantee of a good future, but they learn to move on and love and exist in ways that bring them joy, and I think there's a lot to be learned from that. I also loved the focus on life's simple pleasures in this novel. From drinks to flowers to house furnishings, this felt like a book about art (I'll Give You The Sun style) in the way that it made the reader see the beauty in things they might not have otherwise noticed. I liked this book a lot more than I was expecting to, and plan to read more of LaCour's work in the future.