... exhilarating, maddening, thoroughly entertaining ... In a book full of narratives, some more imaginative and convoluted than others, often conflicting, sometimes heart-breaking, Vida holds her own narrative steady with Eulabee’s distinct voice. While she’s got some all-too-human blind spots, Eulabee is pretty clued-in and clear-eyed about others’ actions, and her unusual sense of humor comes hand-in-hand with a healthy dose of scepticism, particularly when it comes to adults’ foibles and faults. (She’s downright funny too) ... With its tangible, tactile details peppered throughout and super-smart, quirky Eulabee at its helm, We Run the Tides is deceptively sweet — and as addictive as candy.
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 — and at the same time am relieved to have outgrown ... There are so many moods and story currents running through this wonder of a novel ... Female adolescence in this novel feels like being sucked out to sea. It's overwhelming, absurd and dangerous and even the best adults can't help. Eulabee and her friends have to figure out how to swim back to shore all on their own.
What We Run the Tides probes so poignantly is the volatility of female adolescence, its on-the-cusp caprices and confusions, as well as the more timeless riddles of independence and identity, seduction and storytelling.
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; while it's almost a shame to finish it so quickly, the novel's very brevity also feels somehow true—as fleeting as a memory.
Is there a better way to come of age than in the first-person plural? Teenage stories take well to a 'we' ... 'We' is where the heroine begins in We Run the Tides, ... 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 true dangers in Eulabee’s world are offstage, on the margins of Maria Fabiola’s story, but suggested with a deft touch by Vida ... Vida’s San Francisco is ramshackle and eccentric, home to heiresses but also tide pools of counterculture backwash ... Still, the affectionate specificity of the portrait she offers is one of the book’s real pleasures.
Using delicate, refined analogies, a jarring plot twist and surprising character development, Vida brings to life Sea Cliff ... The author makes excellent use of San Francisco as a character, one that shapes everyone in the novel in bold, unique ways ... Vida’s masterful portrayal of Eulabee’s inner world, the dynamics of her friend group and the girls’ reactions to the times creates a universal connection for readers in all the right ways ... 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 ... The story plays out inside the architecture of ’80s pop culture, with Vida hitting every right note. It’s a testament to her writing that even someone who grew up across the country from Sea Cliff’s sunny beaches, attending public school where three rivers meet under slate gray skies, could be so easily drawn in by references that evoke what feels like shared life experiences.
... a dreamy, tricky tale of girlhood, secrets and the shifting sands of truth ... captivating ... an enchanting, literary novel, realistic but a little unreal. Vida gives a tender, incisive portrayal of adolescence. The girls' cruelties are visceral and impermanent, the stressors of Sea Cliff somehow both superficial and profound ... Vida's readers will be changed, too, by this cleverly woven story about honesty, betrayal, charm and illusion, about what matters in youth and what matters always.
I really enjoyed this story. Eulabee is an interesting girl who is carefree and has a very inquisitive personality, which is likable. She seems very mature for her age. I didn’t expect the story to fast forward at the end to 2019; however, I really enjoyed this aspect of the book and actually wished the author had made this part of the story longer.
... [a] capricious, dark and often very funny novel ... 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 ... All this is breathlessly narrated by the under-confident yet incorrigibly truth-telling Eulabee. From the first chapter, with Vida’s artful use of the first-person plural, Eulabee sets herself and her friends up as creatures of myth ... 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.
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.
Ms. Vida’s novel doesn’t generate much suspense from its lies—the plot, so reliant on adult gullibility, is pretty hard to believe. But it’s insightful about the ways that girls of a certain age feel pressured to let their imaginations run wild.
Intently observant, acidly funny, stoic, and smart, Eulabee is an incandescent creation, and Vida, whose polished and incisive prose is in the Didion mode, inflects this droll and sensitive coming-of-age tale, a cool match for Claire Messud’s The Burning Girl , 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.
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. Their transformations are set to rushing sentences, a pace of existence which Vida renders with exceptional honesty ... I wish the novel had remained with its teenage cast, for whom adulthood is both a menace and a magnet. Though the view may be limited, it is detailed and vibrant, nonetheless ... Perhaps had more of San Francisco made an appearance in We Run the Tides, Vida’s brief detour through the problems of 2019 would have made sense ... is at its most potent when the gaze remains focused on protagonists whose psychologies cannot be mapped onto larger currents. These are fluctuating figures whose relationships have a fierce ebb and flow, but the consequences are only ever small, restricted to just a few streets. Still, Eulabee and Maria Fabiola struggle to become more, to grow bigger, and Vida lets them be envious, conspiratorial, droll, dazzling; she gives them space to be unsalvageable or to be redeemed.
If it’s wicked pleasure you’re after – flavored with Mean Girls and a light sprinkling of social/political commentary – look no further than Vida’s latest ... Despite serious undertones, there is much comedy to be found in the novel, deriving from Eulabee’s deadpan directness which may be a little advanced for her teenage years, nevertheless offers guiltily-enjoyable judgementalism towards many easy targets ... A last chapter, delivered decades later, traces Eulabee’s intervening years, career, marriage and eventual resettlement. Concluding with an encounter between Eulabee and Maria Fabiola on the dreamy isle of Capri, Vida draws a deeper distinction between the then and now, the real and the fake, the honest broker and the liar. This epilogue delivers darker roots to an otherwise relatively easy-to-consume piece of work. It’s welcome but doesn’t change the book’s overall impact. Vida writes compellingly. She enjoys woman-centered scenarios and the exploration of character enigmas. This is one of those, and it’s an unthreatening pleasure.
... this isn’t just a glossy portrait of entitled rich kids gone off the rails. It’s a nuanced look at what happens when one member of a group — in this case, Eulabee — decides to go against the grain and bring truth (and, therefore, lies) to light, despite the consequences ... There are strands of this brisk and drama-heavy narrative that either warrant more development or don’t quite gel ... Still, there’s something naughty, almost gleeful about this nostalgia-soaked portrayal of pre-tech-boom San Francisco that keeps the pages turning. We Run the Tides harks back to a pre-cell-phone, pre-social-media era ... That, coupled with a final chapter involving a chance encounter decades later that adds both perspective and much-needed depth to the story, makes Vida’s foray into the frothy turmoil of postpubescence worth a gander.
There is plenty to admire in this novel, with its echoes of J.D. Salinger and Margaret Atwood (Cat’s Eye) ... The question is: Why does this novel fall a bit flat? Perhaps the problem lies with Vida’s decision to focus on Eulabee’s point of view; we never quite get why Maria is such a prevaricating, manipulative control freak ... The reader gets some answers in the last chapter ... Eulabee, now a translator, moved with her family to the more affordable margins of the city and it’s by chance that she meets her former frenemy at a literary festival in a Capri hotel. Only then does Vida reveal some of what’s behind Maria’s crumbling defenses and the extremes she will go to guard them. It is the best part of the book and leaves one hungry for a deeper, broader look at these two women, so different yet so alike, grappling with the consequences of their actions. I would read that book.
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.
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 ... 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.
