“Yerba Buena,” intense with foggy timelines that are woven in a seemingly scattered way, begins with Sara, a 16-year-old looking for her recently missing girlfriend in a haunting small town in Northern California. In the characters’ most deciding moments, the minty scent calms and revitalizes the two characters the minty herb appears in - and sometimes leads to - magically mundane moments in this realistically heart-wrenching lovers’ tale. These two women briefly find each other in the proverbial eye of the hurricane of their tumultuous lives and choose to return to each other. In Nina LaCour’s first non-young adult novel of the same name, sprigs of the fresh-smelling plant (as well as an abstraction of the herb in the form of an eponymously-named restaurant) appear at turning points within the lives of Sara and Emilie.
Yerba Buena is the Spanish name (literally translating to “good herb”) for clinopodium douglasii, a refreshingly-scented herb from the mint family that grows in abundance along the West Coast of North America.
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