It’s nearing the end of high school and big changes are brewing in Emi’s life. Her brother’s gone overseas, leaving his apartment to her and her best friend for the summer. Her best friend will be moving to Michigan come fall to go to school, and Emi’s brother’s single expectation for his sister is to “do something epic” in the apartment that summer. To make a memory that will stay with her forever.

She will, but it won’t be in the way she expects.

A little about Emi: she works in film, but she’s not an actress nor a director. Her role is working on the design and arrangement of the set. When the story opens, she’s in the midst of acquiring a couch she thinks will be perfect for a scene in the film she’s working on. She haunts estate sales and flea markets and thrift stores in order to find those pieces that will make a set sing.

And it’s while she’s doing this that bigger things unravel for her. She’s found herself at the estate sale of a former western actor who was well known in his day for his work. While procuring possible items for a set, Emi and best friend Charlotte discover a letter addressed to a woman who lives not too far away. The two of them decide it’s their duty to deliver the letter.

Of course, it’s not going to be that easy. When they arrive at the addressee’s home, they discover that she is no longer alive, either. So they choose to open the letter, and upon further research, Emi and Charlotte realize there’s a lot more to this letter than they thought — and they choose to pursue any and all leads possible to get the letter (and subsequent information about a bank account) to the person it most belongs to: the granddaughter of the deceased western star, Ava.

While it sounds like a mystery, Nina LaCour’s Everything Leads to You is not. It’s a love story. Ava, the girl who the letter eventually gets to, becomes a romantic interest for Emi early on. Emi, who is nursing the wounds of an on again off again relationship with Morgan, wonders whether she’ll ever fall in love with someone who cares about her as much as she cares about them. And it’s something she’ll continue to wonder as she becomes closer to Ava, even as she allows herself to have the feelings she does for Ava without pursuing them.

The world LaCour creates in her novel is worth noting. There’s an appearance of privilege and freedom, but it’s done in a way that feels real and authentic to the story. Emi and Charlotte live in an apartment by themselves, but now that they’re done with high school, it makes sense that they have that freedom. Both girls have a lot of freedom to move around and do what they want to, but both girls also work. Work is a big part of their lives, in a really positive way. They have jobs which seem strange for teenagers to have — especially when Emi manages to land a new gig being the director of design — but for two girls living in Los Angeles, it’s also not a piece of the plot that feels impossible. It’s just the lives they lead.

Ava, on the other hand, lives a very different life than Emi and Charlotte. She comes from a different world, where her life has been a series of chaoses and instability. But what makes her so standout is she not only recognizes and owns that part of her, but she is who she is because she’s able to live her own life in spite of those things. Her best friend Jamal she met because the two of them had to take the same bus to get to work everyday, and that lengthy bus trip allowed them to talk and get to know one another. And while Jamal looks like he plays a minor role in the story, I enjoyed his presence and would have loved even more. Jamal wasn’t easy. He didn’t play around. And he was willing to call people out and force them to dig deeper into who they were.

It’s because of Jamal that we learn Emi is not entirely white. That despite her skin looking white, she’s one-fourth black. This scene, dropped into the book nearly two-thirds of the way through, isn’t splashy nor some kind of big reveal. It’s a fact-laying scene, but it’s woven and incorporated so well that it made me want more from Jamal because clearly, he had a way of getting people to give of themselves. While Ava had made it clear he was a great person, it’s in this scene we see Emi discover it herself.

We know Emi and Ava find one another through this letter, but it’s when Emi is offered a part as a design director in a small, low-budget film that their relationship becomes something more. Ava had always wanted to act, and Emi tells her about the film’s need for a female to play one of the parts. After an audition, the part becomes Ava’s, and the two of them work together closely as Ava learns her lines and as Emi works on designing the look of the scenes — which leads her to offering the apartment she’s living in as one of the apartments for the film.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book was how Emi’s need to solve the mysteries of Ava’s life tied into her role in putting together films. Emi, as a person who assists in designing sets, was reluctant to listen to those who told her some of her ideas wouldn’t work well in the particular scenes being filmed. She thought her ideas were perfect, and she becomes upset when those around her prove their vision to be more correct than hers. She’s less happy being a spectator than she is being the person who gets to direct the entire look and feel. So when Emi realizes she can’t solve the issues of Ava’s life, that she has to accept the fact that Ava’s challenges and means of resolving her problems fall squarely into the hands of Ava and not her, she has a hard time accepting this role. It’s not that she’s a control freak; it’s that it comes hard for her to accept that not every problem and not every puzzle is one she can nor should attempt to solve all on her own. Despite the independence and freedom she has in her life, she can’t expect the same from those around her. Things do and will come up that force her to see that not everything can nor should be handed to her. She sometimes has to step back from directing and sit back to be a spectator in order to to see an entire scene come alive.

While I didn’t love the way that everything relating to Ava’s discovery came as easily as it did — even the dead ends were resolved a little too quickly and cleanly for me — I loved the way that she and Emi became girlfriends. Ava offered Emi more than one opportunity to act upon her feelings, but it wasn’t immediate. Emi was more reluctant, more put off because of her own past relationships, than Ava was, but it was ultimately Ava who showed her it was okay to pursue those feelings.

That epic summer adventure in Emi’s brother’s apartment was, of course, Emi falling in love.

LaCour weaves in the set design metaphor quite nicely. The actors in any film are important, but as Emi explains early on, what people tend to overlook when watching a film, are the ways that the spaces the actors play in are created, designed, and used to enhance their story lines. Those interiors are things that are present, that are thought about, that are developed and redeveloped, in a way that’s not always seen on the screen, despite how hugely important they are in the film and to the characters playing in those spaces.

The interior, of course, is love and how it’s created and recreated, how it’s fashioned and refashioned, how it’s carefully constructed and then reconstructed. The actors matter, but they only matter as much as the thing holding them together. In this case, it doesn’t matter at all that it’s one girl falling in love with another girl. What matters is that it’s something holding them together.

Everything Leads to You is a love story, with a full cast of well-rendered characters and a setting that comes alive. This one will especially appeal to older YA readers and those who never saw — or don’t see right now — high school as the kind of thing they’re invested in too deeply. Readers who want a story with heart will want to pick this up, as will those readers who are seeking lesbian romance stories and finding that the bulk of them are less focused on the love and more focused on what that love might look like to others. Here, those cameras aren’t even part of the story.

Everything Leads to You will be available May 15. Review copy received from the publisher.