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.
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. Her new novel, We Run the Tides, will be published by Ecco on February 9, 2021. She is a founding editor of The Believer and coeditor 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.
"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
"[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]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
"[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
"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
"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
"[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
"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
