Audiobook Review: Meet Me in the Garden by Nina LaCour

A Book of the Month Club pick, featured on NPR’s All Things Considered, and earning starred reviews from Booklist and Publishers Weekly, Meet Me in the Garden is the book that Nina LaCour’s readers have been waiting for since she made the leap from YA to adult fiction. Inspired by her own Creole roots, it is the most personal thing she has written and it shows. Check out our thoughts below!

TY Macmillan Audio for the audio ARC, which in no way has influenced this review (my eternal love of Nina…well, that’s another story).

Meet Me in the Garden

by Nina LaCour
Published by: Flatiron
on August 4, 2026
Genres: Adult, Historical Fiction, LGBTQIA+
Bookshop
Goodreads

From bestselling author Nina LaCour comes a sweeping family saga that wrestles with themes of self-discovery and love in all forms, inspired by the author's own Creole family.

New Orleans, 1944. Odette has always been one of the Honore sisters, glamorous and admired in their Creole community. But while Odette’s older sisters are content to be wives and mothers, Odette has always wanted something else. It is only with her beloved cousin, Delphine, that Odette can tell her secret: she is in love with a woman, and she longs to be an artist.

Delphine has a secret lover, too, a white man. In the hidden garden they’ve discovered, Odette and Delphine can dream of futures full of passion and freedom.

But five years later, Odette's life is nothing like what she'd planned. She's a widowed mother, living in Los Angeles, and she and Delphine, who is passing as white, have spiraled away from each other. When Delphine reaches a breaking point, Odette must make a shattering choice to try to hold her family together.

Profound and expansive, a story of love and longing, art and motherhood, friendship and desire, Meet Me in the Garden is a decades-spanning tour de force, inspired by the author’s family and tracing the history of the Great Migration.

Review

Nina LaCour has always written from a deeply personal place, but Meet Me in the Garden hits differently knowing it was inspired by her own Creole roots and family history. Odette Honoré is a young woman in 1944 New Orleans who dreams of being an artist and is secretly in love with another woman, and the novel follows her and her cousin Delphine across decades and across the country as their lives become nothing like what they planned. It is a sweeping family saga, which never feels like it is trying to be sweeping. It just is.

What Nina does so beautifully here is layer everything. The hardship of being queer in mid-century America sits alongside the hardship of being a person of color in a country that has very specific ideas about both. And then there is the particular complexity of Delphine’s story, the experience of being white passing and what that costs and what it enables and how that changes your world. Nina holds all of it with the same care she brings to her characters and it shows on every page.

The audiobook is exceptional. Angel Pean’s narration drops you into New Orleans from the first sentence and does not let go. I listened to this one the way you eat a meal you do not want to end, all 16 hours of it!