Where It All Goes Down
Clover, California
The imaginary town of Clover, California fits its name very well. It sounds a little hippie-ish, right? And indeed, Clover is a place where it's completely normal for Lennie to be named after John Lennon and for her school to have optional morning meditation instead of sports teams. It's also chock full of nature—including a forest filled with very old trees and a place called Flying Man's, which is a swimming area with a waterfall.
Sound magical? We think so, too. It's the type of place that fits its quirky, larger-than-life characters well. When you live in a town where multiple people eat their lunches on high tree branches, and an innkeeper has placed a bedroom in the middle of the forest for lovers to stumble across when out for a stroll, it's not that much of a leap to really believe that Gram's roses are aphrodisiacs, or that a specific houseplant really does grow and wilt depending on Lennie's health.
It's not just outside, either—some of the houses and rooms in Clover seem to pulse with a life of their own. Nothing feels more alive than Lennie's room, which she dubs "the Inner Pumpkin Sanctum," because of Bailey's pre-death insistence that they paint their bedroom orange. For all of Part 1, Lennie treats the room like a shrine to Bailey—refusing to pack up any of her sister's things, or even move them. But over the course of Part 2, she packs Bailey's things in boxes and finds a spot for them in the attic, by a sunny, open window. The room, then, in the end, is all hers.