Everything Leads to You

Designing a Life Beyond the Set

Emi Price has already built a career most people twice her age would envy: fresh out of high school, she's a sought-after set designer working on real film productions around Los Angeles. She has an instinct for atmosphere, for turning empty rooms into believable worlds. What she hasn't figured out is how to build something lasting in her own life, especially when it comes to love.

That changes when a routine estate sale turns up a letter that doesn't belong to the past it was buried in. The note hints at a secret kept by a famous actor for decades, and Emi, unable to leave a good mystery alone, starts pulling at the thread. The search takes her outside the soundstages and backlots she knows so well and into the messier, unscripted territory of someone else's hidden history.

Following the trail leads Emi to Ava, a young woman with her own stake in the story Emi is trying to piece together. What begins as curiosity about a stranger's past gradually becomes something far more personal, as Emi's careful distance from her own feelings starts to give way.

Hidden Histories and Coming Into Your Own

LaCour, known for restrained, emotionally precise portraits of queer adolescence, uses the conventions of a small mystery to approach a larger question: what does it cost to keep a true self hidden, and what does it take to finally stop? The dead actor's concealed life and Emi's own unexamined desires run on parallel tracks, so that uncovering one history becomes inseparable from Emi learning to be honest about her own.

The Los Angeles film industry setting is more than scenery. Emi's work is literally about constructing convincing illusions, and the novel draws a quiet parallel between the artifice of a film set and the performances people put on in their own lives — the version of themselves they show the world versus the one they keep offstage. Within LaCour's body of young adult fiction, the novel sits alongside her other work in treating queer romance not as a plot twist or a lesson, but as an ordinary, central part of growing up, rendered with the same unhurried attention she gives to grief and friendship elsewhere in her writing.

Why Everything Leads to You Has Been Challenged

The developing relationship between Emi and Ava sits at the center of most objections to this book. As the two young women move from friendship into romance, the story treats their attraction and affection with the same seriousness and tenderness a reader would expect from a heterosexual coming-of-age romance — and it is precisely that normalization of a same-sex relationship, rather than any single scene, that has drawn scrutiny from those who believe such material is inappropriate for teen readers or should require parental gatekeeping before a student can access it.

Complaints have also pointed to the novel's handling of a secretive, nontraditional personal history uncovered through the letter at the center of its mystery, with some readers objecting to a young adult book built around uncovering a hidden adult relationship at all. Taken together, these concerns reflect a broader discomfort with LGBTQ content in school libraries rather than any one explicit passage. In this catalog, the book has been formally challenged in 1 state and 1 school district.