A love letter to the craft and romance of film and fate in front of—and behind—the camera from the award-winning author of Hold Still.
A wunderkind young set designer, Emi has already started to find her way in the competitive Hollywood film world.
Emi is a film buff and a true romantic, but her real-life relationships are a mess. She has desperately gone back to the same girl too many times to mention. But then a mysterious letter from a silver screen legend leads Emi to Ava. Ava is unlike anyone Emi has ever met. She has a tumultuous, not-so-glamorous past, and lives an unconventional life. She’s enigmatic…. She’s beautiful. And she is about to expand Emi’s understanding of family, acceptance, and true romance. (Goodreads)
I'm a big fan of Nina LaCour - it started with The Disenchantments, which initially won me over with its cover but managed to wrap me in a gentle swaddling of emotions, to send an ache through me as the rising sun bathed me in golden light because I hadn't yet been to sleep, so in love with the book. It was the same with Hold Still which struck me deeper and got straight into my core and pulled tears and wistful sadness and hope and gentle optimism from me as I read through the night and cried tears in the corner of my bed. She has a way with her stories - with her emotions, with her words; they evoke things and they get under my skin. When I heard she had a new book coming out, I was excited but it was after reading this post about Nina talking of Everything Leads to You, of race and identity and sexuality, I was beside myself with anticipation.
And like she always has, Nina delivered.
I'm not a film person, and I can't tell you much about the production, but Emi is, and as a narrator, she does a fabulous job of turning this story into one - but grounding it with reality.
Emi lives movies, as an intern helping with design and set building, before landing a lucky job assisting with all the creative matters of an up and coming film, so it's no wonder she sees life as a film: scenes in place of moments and minutes. It's easy to become caught up in a story and its expectations, forgetting the realities of life and living to the glamour of Hollywood romance. So when she and her best friend Charlotte stumble into a mystery about a late Western actor and his only living - unknown - daughter, it's easy to get caught up in the story and the scenes, to imagine them playing out or lines that might be used.
But Ava is not a story, or a mystery to be unraveled. She is more than these important scenes - more than that, she is more than MOMENTS. She is a person who lives and does and exists in the ways that characters on the silver screen don't. And it's probably how Emi falls in love at all.
Nina LaCour writes with superb heart and soul, it's easy to fall in love with the story. For all the tragedy unwoven, it is hopeful and optimistic, a matter of love after loss and the sunrises after sunsets. Family is such a core, not just for Ava trying to find the missing pieces of hers, but Emi, too, blessed by a supportive, affirming family who has always taken care of her. (And Emi sees this, too, is aware of her privileges in life, and the opportunities they have given her.) Though first person isn't one of my favorite narratives, LaCour does it with such voice and conviction, it feels less awkward than other attempts and instead reads quite honestly, as if Emi is sitting with you and a pitcher of lemonade, telling you the story.
It's an utterly sweet story of self-discovery and healing and falling in love, in finding the beauty in reality versus the facade of beauty produced by Hollywood. It is coming home and taking a leap if faith and how little moments add up to so much more.
It was incredibly easy for me to fall in love with this one, savoring it and devouring it at the same time. Nina LaCour's prose was so easy to read, like sitting and talking with a friend, and Emi was so easy to like, so easy to care about her and Ava as well. What I feel Nina LaCour does best is not simply unveil emotion, but spill it out, inescapable but not ominous. It is raw without being messy, it is deep without being pretentious, and it's so easy to feel again what it was to be young and falling in love with someone who your soul sang for, who was large than life but real and tangible.
