Swati's Reviews > We Run the Tides

My rating is 3.5 stars.

When the world churns all you want to do is bury yourself nose deep in a book that whisks you away into a different one. That’s what Vendela Vida’s “We Run the Tides” did for me. Eulabee and her best friend Maria Fabiola are teenagers who live in a tony neighbourhood named Sea Cliff, which looks out on to the Golden Gate Bridge. “Everything in Sea Cliff is about the view of the bridge.” Set in the 1980’s, the story follows Eulabee, Maria Fabiola, and a few other girls who study at the Spragg School for Girls. Life is all about boys, parties, and beach walks until a small incident(in fact, two) change everything.

The story spins out in a classic case of unreliable narrators. The incident, where a man in a car stops Eulabee to ask her the time, is viewed in different ways by different people. To top it all, Maria Fabiola disappears setting in motion some rumours, whispered facts, and other things in between.

Vida’s writing is captivating, freezing those breathless moments of adolescence when everything seems plausible and larger-than-life. There’s endless curiosity, drama, and anxiety about anything and everything. I was immersed in the neighbourhood too, which has fabulously wealthy families living in mansions each with an equally fabulous story of its own,

“We know the towering brick house where the magician Carter the Great lived; he had a theatre inside and his dining room table rose up through a trapdoor…We know the imposing salmon-colored house that had a party at which masked robbers appeared; when a female guest wouldn’t relinquish her ring, they cut off her finger.”

I really enjoyed this vision of a place well before the sleek tech start-ups, restaurants sporting vegan lunch menus, and cafes with Edison bulbs and exposed brickwork popped up. As Eulabee says towards the end “The streets of Sea Cliff are no longer ours.”

In the end, if you ask me, there wasn’t a particular story to be told. Yet, it was an engaging read about friendships and adolescence. A nice one if you want a fast read.

Thanks to Atlantic Books for the ARC.