Author: Vendela Vida
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Ecco
Publication Date: February 9, 2021
Book Description: 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.
Rating: 4 Stars
Review: We meet Eulabee as a 13 year old living in San Francisco in the 1980’s. At the start of this story, she has a tight knit group of friends, especially her best friend Maria Fabiola. An than an incident occurs that causes a major rift with Eulabee and her friends.
After that incident, Maria goes missing, which sets up this literary mystery. At times this book felt very YA, but in the end the author wrote a very poignant story that captures that time and place perfectly.
Vida wrote this as if she was in the mind of this young adolescent. Her thoughts and feelings felt as if you were right there along with Eulabee. This is literary to its core, even though there is a mystery, this is all about character development. Somehow Vida, was able to make a literary fiction novel, fast paced that I did not want to end.
This is a great book for discussion and book clubs. There is a lot to unpack here, but totally worth it in the end.
Thank you NetGalley and Ecco Books for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.
Obsessed Bookaholic 