NOVEMBER 2020 - AudioFile
Marin Ireland’s powerful performance captures a girl’s joy and disillusionment in this compelling coming-of-age story. Thirteen-year-old Eulabee is best friends with the enigmatic Maria Fabiola, and they are on top of the world until the very grounded Eulabee begins to question the truth of what Maria says. Ireland’s voices for all the characters consistently evoke their distinct personalities, both as teenagers and grown-ups, and reveal the complexity of their friendships with one another as Eulabee journeys to adulthood. The moody backdrops of San Francisco and its nearby sea cliffs are showcased by Ireland’s resonant timbre and sensitive pacing, which capture the lyrical quality of the prose. Ireland’s evocative narration is well suited to this atmospheric story. M.F. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
11/16/2020
Vida spins a spirited if uneven coming-of-age yarn around a girl’s disappearance in 1984 San Francisco. Eulabee, 13, is growing up in Sea Cliff, where she and her charismatic best friend, Maria Fabiola, along with their friends Julia and Faith, attend an elite all-girls school and know the neighborhood front and back. One day, while Eulabee is on the way to Faith’s house with the other three girls before school, a man in a white car asks her for the time. Differing accounts of what happened next cause a schism between Eulabee and Maria Fabiola, but shortly after, Maria Fabiola disappears. In Maria Fabiola’s absence, Eulabee becomes friendly with skateboarder Keith, and even gets up the nerve to invite him to a Psychedelic Furs concert. Their friendship eventually leads to a tragic denouement for all concerned, as more kids go missing and the truth finally comes out. Despite a bountiful final section set in 2019, in which Eulabee confronts her memories and the characters’ fates come full circle, the various threads don’t quite cohere. At its best, the novel channels the girlish effervescence of Nora Johnson’s The World of Henry Orient while updating Cyra McFadden’s classic satire The Serial, but it’s not quite enough to fully satisfy. Agent: Nicole Aragi, Aragi, Inc. (Feb.)
From the Publisher
The year is probably too young to make this kind of pronouncement, but the new novel I know I'm going to be rereading in the coming months and spending a lot of time thinking about is Vendela Vida's We Run the Tides. It's a tough and exquisite sliver of a short novel whose world I want to remain lost in. . . . [A] spectacular narrator . . . [A] wonder of a novel." — Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
“Vida captures the unstable sensation of early adolescent reality, that period teetering between childhood and young adulthood in which outlandish lies can seem weirdly plausible and basic facts totally alien…the affectionate specificity of the portrait she offers is one of the book’s real pleasures...Vida’s San Francisco is ramshackle and eccentric, home to heiresses but also tide pools of counterculture backwash." — New York Times Book Review
“Vida populates her stories with liars, runaways, the reckless — those most adept at reconfiguring their appearances, those caught in the process of becoming. She is excellent at writing teenagers, who try on and discard identities as quickly as the days pass. . . . A nod to Edith Wharton. . . . Detailed and vibrant . . . As much a novel of girlhood vulnerability as it is a story fortification and fear.” — Los Angeles Review of Books
"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." — O, the Oprah Magazine
"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.” — Nick Hornby
"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 unraveling tether to truth.” — Lisa Halliday, author of Asymmetry
"Vida, whose polished and incisive prose is in the Didion mode, inflects this droll and sensitive coming-of-age tale . . . with eviscerating social commentary. A nimble and arresting drama about the spell cast by beauty, the compulsion to lie, the valor of forthrightness, and the inevitability of the inexplicable." — Booklist (starred review)
"I didn't want it to end." — Tom Stoppard
"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." — Danzy Senna, author of New People
“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.” — Sally Wen Mao, author of Oculus
“The young narrator of Vendela Vida’s new novel is cast out of her friend crew (For what? For nothing) at the moment she and the girls around her are just beginning to understand the power they hold, and how to wield it. 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.” — Mary Beth Keane, author of Ask Again, Yes
"We Run the Tides is knowing, sometimes funny and always propulsive as it examines girlhood, friendship, and the strong pull of the past." — Meg Wolitzer
“[A]n engaging, intelligent story.” — Town & Country
“If you can’t get enough ’80s nostalgia (and I count myself among you), Vendela Vida’s latest will scratch that itch. In this tense story of teen female friendship and betrayal in the pre–tech bro years of San Francisco, BFFs Eulabee and Maria Fabiola have a dramatic falling out that’s followed by Maria Fabiola’s disappearance. Early readers have been responding with ALL CAPS–level excitement; my curiosity is suitably piqued. “ — LitHub
“[An] atmospheric, glistering novel of adolescence and innocence lost...Vida perfectly captures the panicky feeling inherent to adolescence, of wanting to know everything that's going on, but being aware that you'll probably only ever scratch the surface of the truth.” — Refinery29
“Vendela Vida crafts a tense tale of girlhood, privilege, and innocence.” — Alma
“[A] perceptive tale of losing innocence and finding one’s true self. As consistently surprising as it is hauntingly resonant (not to mention often very funny), Vida’smchronicle of female friendship is a fast, addictive read.” — Entertainment Weekly
“[T]here’s something naughty, almost gleeful about this nostalgia-soaked portrayal of pre-tech-boom San Francisco that keeps the pages turning." — San Francisco Chronicle
“Exhilarating, maddening, thoroughly entertaining novel…irresistible voice…With its tangible, tactile details peppered throughout and super-smart, quirky Eulabee at it’s helm, We Run the Tides is deceptively sweet—and as addictive as candy.” — Boston Globe
"In We Run the Tides, author Vendela Vida has crafted a coming-of-age tale replete with friendship, sexuality and a good dose of mystery. Vida’s writing shines as she captures this exciting, vulnerable and sometimes worrisome time when a girl is puzzling out her position in the world, who she wants to be, and how that fits with the person others have decided she already is." — Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Booklist (starred review)
"Vida, whose polished and incisive prose is in the Didion mode, inflects this droll and sensitive coming-of-age tale . . . with eviscerating social commentary. A nimble and arresting drama about the spell cast by beauty, the compulsion to lie, the valor of forthrightness, and the inevitability of the inexplicable."
Lisa Halliday
"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 unraveling tether to truth.
New York Times Book Review
Vida captures the unstable sensation of early adolescent reality, that period teetering between childhood and young adulthood in which outlandish lies can seem weirdly plausible and basic facts totally alien…the affectionate specificity of the portrait she offers is one of the book’s real pleasures...Vida’s San Francisco is ramshackle and eccentric, home to heiresses but also tide pools of counterculture backwash."
Tom Stoppard
"I didn't want it to end."
Nick Hornby
"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.”
Danzy Senna
"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."
Maureen Corrigan
The year is probably too young to make this kind of pronouncement, but the new novel I know I'm going to be rereading in the coming months and spending a lot of time thinking about is Vendela Vida's We Run the Tides. It's a tough and exquisite sliver of a short novel whose world I want to remain lost in. . . . [A] spectacular narrator . . . [A] wonder of a novel."
the Oprah Magazine O
"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."
Los Angeles Review of Books
Vida populates her stories with liars, runaways, the reckless — those most adept at reconfiguring their appearances, those caught in the process of becoming. She is excellent at writing teenagers, who try on and discard identities as quickly as the days pass. . . . A nod to Edith Wharton. . . . Detailed and vibrant . . . As much a novel of girlhood vulnerability as it is a story fortification and fear.
Sally Wen Mao
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.
Alma
Vendela Vida crafts a tense tale of girlhood, privilege, and innocence.”
Boston Globe
Exhilarating, maddening, thoroughly entertaining novel…irresistible voice…With its tangible, tactile details peppered throughout and super-smart, quirky Eulabee at it’s helm, We Run the Tides is deceptively sweet—and as addictive as candy.
Meg Wolitzer
"We Run the Tides is knowing, sometimes funny and always propulsive as it examines girlhood, friendship, and the strong pull of the past."
Town & Country
[A]n engaging, intelligent story.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"In We Run the Tides, author Vendela Vida has crafted a coming-of-age tale replete with friendship, sexuality and a good dose of mystery. Vida’s writing shines as she captures this exciting, vulnerable and sometimes worrisome time when a girl is puzzling out her position in the world, who she wants to be, and how that fits with the person others have decided she already is."
Entertainment Weekly
[A] perceptive tale of losing innocence and finding one’s true self. As consistently surprising as it is hauntingly resonant (not to mention often very funny), Vida’smchronicle of female friendship is a fast, addictive read.
Mary Beth Keane
The young narrator of Vendela Vida’s new novel is cast out of her friend crew (For what? For nothing) at the moment she and the girls around her are just beginning to understand the power they hold, and how to wield it. 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.”
Refinery29
[An] atmospheric, glistering novel of adolescence and innocence lost...Vida perfectly captures the panicky feeling inherent to adolescence, of wanting to know everything that's going on, but being aware that you'll probably only ever scratch the surface of the truth.
LitHub
If you can’t get enough ’80s nostalgia (and I count myself among you), Vendela Vida’s latest will scratch that itch. In this tense story of teen female friendship and betrayal in the pre–tech bro years of San Francisco, BFFs Eulabee and Maria Fabiola have a dramatic falling out that’s followed by Maria Fabiola’s disappearance. Early readers have been responding with ALL CAPS–level excitement; my curiosity is suitably piqued. “
San Francisco Chronicle
[T]here’s something naughty, almost gleeful about this nostalgia-soaked portrayal of pre-tech-boom San Francisco that keeps the pages turning."
Library Journal
09/01/2020
In this new work from Kate Chopin Award winner Vida, teenage best friends Eulabee and Maria saunter around their San Francisco neighborhood as if they owned it. But an argument about something they thought they saw on the way to their fancy private school splits their friendship. And then Maria disappears. With a 125,000-copy first printing.
School Library Journal
02/01/2021
Gr 9 Up—Eulabee's life in San Francisco in the mid-1980s is pleasant since she and her eighth-grade girlfriends are free to wander and explore Sea Cliff and the nearby beach. They all walk together to their private girls' school, where they do well. One day on the way to school, Eulabee's best friend claims she saw a dangerous man sitting in a car. Two of the girls agree with the story, but Eulabee says she saw nothing. This act sets in motion a chain of events that gets out of control. The author describes the feelings and thoughts of 13-year-olds quite well during that fateful school year. Teens will relate to Eulabee's problems in a stressful situation. The final chapter skips ahead to 2019 when the girls are in their 50s, and readers learn what happened to them as adults—an interesting and satisfying conclusion. Eulabee's mother is Swedish and the other girls are also cued as white. VERDICT This relatable novel is recommended for high school and public library collections.—Karlan Sick, formerly at New York P.L.
NOVEMBER 2020 - AudioFile
Marin Ireland’s powerful performance captures a girl’s joy and disillusionment in this compelling coming-of-age story. Thirteen-year-old Eulabee is best friends with the enigmatic Maria Fabiola, and they are on top of the world until the very grounded Eulabee begins to question the truth of what Maria says. Ireland’s voices for all the characters consistently evoke their distinct personalities, both as teenagers and grown-ups, and reveal the complexity of their friendships with one another as Eulabee journeys to adulthood. The moody backdrops of San Francisco and its nearby sea cliffs are showcased by Ireland’s resonant timbre and sensitive pacing, which capture the lyrical quality of the prose. Ireland’s evocative narration is well suited to this atmospheric story. M.F. © AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2020-10-14
A novel of youth and not-quite-innocence set in 1980s California, where teenage loyalties are tested by the disappearance of one girl and the growing suspicion, on the part of her best friend, that an elaborate deception may have been perpetrated.
Thirteen-year-old Eulabee, “a very good student with a sinister side,” and her best friend, Maria Fabiola, a precocious beauty, are as lucky as any California girls can be. Living in the wealthy enclave of Sea Cliff with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge (though Eulabee’s family is not rich), they attend the exclusive Spragg School for Girls and are renowned for their daring ability to scale the local cliffs and to read the treacherous ocean tides. They also know “where the boys live” in their neighborhood, though the danger at the heart of the novel resides elsewhere. “Separately we are good girls,” Eulabee explains, “together...we are trouble.” Innocent trouble, that is, of the teenage variety involving drugs (negligible), alcohol (purveyed by bad boys), and lying to parents and teachers. The first shadow to fall on this breezy narrative is that of a parked car noticed by the girls one morning on their way to school. The driver asks them the time, they answer and walk on, but Maria Fabiola insists, “He was touching himself…and he said he’s going to find us later!” Eulabee, who says she didn’t see this happen, is branded a traitor at school (and later a “slut” for being mauled at a party). Then Maria Fabiola goes missing. Two more apparent disappearances follow, one all too real. The narrative darkens, and Eulabee’s impulse to uncover the truth behind the initial event both increases her isolation and, ironically, intensifies the tabloid drama. “The newspapers called what happened the Sea Cliff Seizures, and the name stuck,” she reflects decades later when a chance meeting in 2019 sheds new light on the distant affair. That final chapter, in its compressed elegance and psychological subtlety, also hints at the novel that might have been.
An engaging if somewhat flat teenage narrative of an apparent abduction and a dissolving friendship.
