We run the tides A novel

Vendela Vida

Large print - 2021

Best friends Eulabee and Maria Fabiola have a vehement falling out after disagreeing on the nature of an act they witness while walking to their upscale all-girls' school, and Maria Fabiola's sudden disappearance soon after that exposes dark community secrets.

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Subjects
Genres
Psychological fiction
Bildungsromans
Detective and mystery fiction
Novels
Published
New York, NY : Harper Large Print, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Vendela Vida (author)
Edition
First Harper Large Print edition
Physical Description
322 pages (large print) ; 23 cm
ISBN
9780063063136
Contents unavailable.
Review by Booklist Review

ldquo;I am a daring enigma," states precocious, 13-year-old Eulabee as she gives us a tour of mid--1980s Sea Cliff, a tony San Francisco neighborhood with views of the Golden Gate Bridge, celebrities, houses with dark histories, fog, and a steep, rocky promontory separating two beaches that Eulabee and her best friend, Maria Fabiola, know how to scurry across between high tides. Eulabee's family is not wealthy. Her city native father owns a gallery, her Swedish mother is a nurse, but Eulabee attends the nearby all-girls' private school, biding her time with teachers lacking her level of mordant and mischievous intelligence. She relies on her friends, but tectonic forces shift when Maria suddenly turns alarmingly beautiful, and Eulabee, possessed of audacious integrity, refuses to go along with Maria's increasingly dangerous fabrications. Eulabee is ostracized; Maria disappears. Intently observant, acidly funny, stoic, and smart, Eulabee is an incandescent creation, and Vida (The Diver's Clothes Lie Empty, 2015), 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 (2017), 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.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

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.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

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.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review

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.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

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. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.