Diversify Yourself: LaCour captures the magic of the movies within pages of a novel

Serena Bettis • November 8, 2015

20151107_212118 — Everything Leads to You by Nina LaCour. Photo Credit: Serena Bettis

Everything Leads to You is a must read for any teenager going through life. Nina LaCour writes a captivating story about Emi, a recent high school graduate with a fierce passion for movies and dreams of becoming a well-known set designer, her best friend, Charlotte, and their summer quest to make something epic happen. Two different stories seemingly overlap throughout the novel, one with Emi and Charlotte searching for the mysterious descendant of a famous actor, and the other dealing with Emi’s first major movie production job. Emi tries to master and learn more about how to do her job, get over her first love while meeting someone new, and discover new things about how person’s past changes them, all while keeping up her energy and supporting her friends.

My favorite aspect of the book is Emi’s attitude and perspective on everything, and the overall tone of the book. Even when she messes up, gets confused, or fights with the people she cares about, she never gives up. There is never any point in the book where I do not like her because she did something stupid when she should have known better, or becomes irrationally angry for something that has happened. She really goes with the flow of events in her life, learns from her mistakes as she makes them, and apologizes once she realizes she was wrong. Her love for the movies and the discussion about “the collapse of the fantasy” gives me a newfound appreciation for the business and an understanding of her passion for the job.

This book is also a serious page-turner. While it’s not a fast-paced action book that leaves your heart beating like crazy at the end of each chapter, the story simply compels you to keep on reading, until you reach the end without even noticing. New discoveries about the mystery these girls are solving appear every few pages, along with bright ideas, failures, and triumphs. It is like a movie itself – the events flow freely, without dragging on for too long so they still capture an audience’s attention.

Another fantastic part about this book is the subtle diversity within it. The main character is both a lesbian and part black, and she has two other female love interests who are openly gay as well. Many people of color have large roles, and even though some of their struggles from racist stereotypes are present, the book shows how silly those stereotypes are and does not revolve around them. The most refreshing aspect of the LGBT+ characters is that the plot of the story does not surround their sexual orientation. Instead of focusing on their coming out or how they discovered their sexuality, it shows them as the regular people they are, just living their lives like everyone else.

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Going into Everything Leads to You about three months after I had read it for the first time, I was a bit worried that it would be boring, dull, and ruin my good thoughts on this book. If anything, rereading it made me love the story and the characters even more. In writing style, descriptions, and utter wonderful romance, LaCour captures the magic of the movies within the pages of this novel, and it definitely deserves more attention than only three checkouts from the school library.

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About the Contributor

Serena Bettis, Editor-in-Chief

Serena Bettis, senior, is entering into her third year on the Etched in Stone staff as this year’s Editor-in-Chief. A four year journalism student, she has high hopes for Etched in Stone this school year, and wants to be able to guide the staff in achieving their goals as much as possible. While Bettis has become a much more outspoken person than she was when she started at Fossil Ridge High School, she still finds discomfort speaking in front of large groups of people (“large” being defined anywhere from 6 to 30), but is more than ready to grow in that aspect of leadership over the course of the year. Most of her journalistic goals for the year are not personal, but rather involve the entire program. She aims to further improve upon the look of the Etched in Stone website, which she spent countless hours on her junior year, enough for it to win awards before she graduates.

Aside from Etched in Stone, Bettis takes part in the school marching, jazz, and concert bands as a flute player, volunteers with Key Club, and is the Historian for the National Honor Society. She has also held a part-time job at TCBY for over a year, and now knows more than she needs to about the sugar content in frozen yogurt. In her spare time, which is often hard to come by, Bettis can be found reading for fun, lamenting about how none of the new Young Adult romance novels she used to love so much are good anymore, working on making the perfect French macaron, or binge watching her recent addiction, Game of Thrones. Music is a large part of her life, and her favorite genre is difficult to describe because she listens to many different bands. Some of her favorites include twenty one pilots, All Time Low, and Halsey, more alternative bands such as Issues and SWMRS, pop artists including Carly Rae Jepsen (“she’s so much more than “Call Me Maybe””), and Little Mix, and various songs by Spanish singers.

She is more than ready for graduation, and aspires to be attending college in Chicago by this time next year. Bettis knows that she wants to double major in journalism and foreign languages, with a potential minor in music, though she is undecided on what specific occupation she wants after college. Her best advice to someone who does not know what they are interested in is to simply join different activities and see what happens from there. “Eventually, sometime during sophomore year, journalism became the only class I wanted to go to, and even now I love it more than I used to love band, so that’s when it hit me that this was what I wanted to be involved in for most of my life,” she said. Another somewhat undecided goal of hers is to join the Peace Corps either during or after college, and she hopes that an experience in a different country with complete strangers might help her figure out what exactly she wants to do with her life.