We Run the Tides
A Novel
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3.8 • 85 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
An achingly beautiful story of female friendship, betrayal, and a mysterious disappearance set in the changing landscape of San Francisco
Teenage Eulabee and her magnetic best friend, Maria Fabiola, own the streets of Sea Cliff, their foggy oceanside San Francisco neighborhood. 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 center 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
