We Run the Tides

'Smart, perceptive, elegant, sad, surprising and addictive. And it's also FUNNY.' Nick Hornby

'What We Run the Tides probes so poignantly is the volatility of female adolescence... Knowing and powerfully enigmatic.' Observer



Teenage Eulabee and her magnetic best friend, Maria Fabiola, own the streets of Sea Cliff, their foggy oceanside San Francisco neighbourhood. They know Sea Cliff's homes and beaches, its hidden corners and eccentric characters - as well as the upscale all-girls' school they attend. One day, walking to school with friends, they witness a horrible act - or do they? Eulabee and Maria Fabiola vehemently disagree on what happened, and their rupture is followed by Maria Fabiola's sudden disappearance - a potential kidnapping that shakes the quiet community and threatens to expose unspoken truths.



Suspenseful and poignant, We Run the Tides is Vendela Vida's masterful portrait of an inimitable place on the brink of radical transformation. Pre-tech boom San Francisco finds its mirror in the changing lives of the teenage girls at the centre of this story of innocence lost, the pain of too much freedom, and the struggle to find one's authentic self. Told with a gimlet eye and great warmth, We Run the Tides is both a gripping mystery and a tribute to the wonders of youth, in all its beauty and confusion.

'We Run the Tides is hypnotic, knowing, and propulsive as it examines girlhood, friendship, and the strong pull of the past.' Meg Wolitzer



Vendela Vida is the award-winning author of six books, including Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty. She is a founding editor of The Believer magazine, and co-editor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers and Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence, a collection of interviews with musicians. She was a founding board member of 826 Valencia, the San Francisco writing center for youth, and lives in the Bay Area with her family



We Run the Tides is hypnotic, knowing, and propulsive as it examines girlhood, friendship, and the strong pull of the past.



We Run the Tides is smart, perceptive, elegant, sad, surprising and addictive. And it's also FUNNY. Who knew that you could combine all of those qualities into one slim volume? Not many writers, that's for sure. I loved every single page, and was sorry when I had to say goodbye to Eulabee and her family.



There's violence lurking here, but also humor (it's funny!), also love. This is one of the best novels about girlhood and female friendship I've ever read.



The dreamy yearning and turmoil of youth are evoked here so vividly as to seem supernaturally conjured. However long ago you were a teenager, We Run the Tides will bring the quandaries and sensations right back. Vendela Vida has written a novel of absorbing, exquisite economy and percipience. She has also written an intimate allegory of our unravelling tether to truth.



From the first page, We Run the Tides is captivating. A story about girlhood, friendship, and the pathologies of innocence and victimhood, it reminds me of Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, but set against the furious backdrop of San Francisco's Sea Cliff neighborhood. Its scope, ferocity, and main characters are unforgettable. Vendela Vida is masterful at constructing the nuances and complications of how young girls become aware of their power, and the choices they make once they wield it.



The girls in this book are everything, all of us: shape-shifters and outcasts, predators and prey, they lean into and away from the world that claims to know them. Vendela Vida is an astoundingly good writer and the ideas she's wrestling with in these pages-about sexuality and seeing, storytelling and identity-are profound.



I didn't want it to end



Set in a pre-tech boom San Francisco that feels moody, foreboding, and magical, this enigmatic tale of adolescent friendship, a disappearance, and coming-of-age is smart, sly, and as knowing about the mind and heart of a teenage girl as an Elena Ferrante novel.



As consistently surprising as it is hauntingly resonant (not to mention often very funny), Vida's chronicle of female friendship is a fast, addictive read.



Vida excels at capturing the insidious kinds of sexual harassment that are omnipresent in girlhood that they become dangerously invisible.... Manages to make that subject matter both deadly serious and laugh-out-loud, as appropriate and important a read for a real-life middle schooler as for a grown-up adult-lady book club.



A tough and exquisite sliver of a short novel whose world I want to remain lost in.



Four 13-year-old girls in 1980s San Francisco are bound together 'like paper dolls' after the tragic death of one of their fathers. The girls are poised between innocence and experience, and it is a testament to Vida's great skill that she is so thoroughly rooted in their milieu. A scandal concerning one of the girls unfolds along compelling lines.



What We Run the Tides probes so poignantly is the volatility of female adolescence... Knowing and powerfully enigmatic.



Vida expertly presents female teenage sexuality as a crazy fever dream of conspiracy, fear and make-believe in this enigmatic novel which never quite does what you expect it to. Eulabee is an irresistible narrator; subversive, witty, vulnerable and entirely memorable, with the faintest whiff of Holden Caulfield. Strange, startling and rather brilliant.



Capricious, dark and often very funny.Blending the satire of the cult film Clueless with the melancholy of Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides and the shock tactics of Joyce Carol Oates' Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, the book is a shimmering, self-conscious work about the mysteries and betrayals of adolescence... We Run the Tides memorably details the cruelty and unintentional wisdom of adolescence - the horror of being excluded, along with the suppression of individuality that comes as part of being a gang.