Award-winning actor Marin Ireland performed a dramatic reading of the first chapter from Vendela Vida’s novel We Run the Tides. Ireland also narrated the audiobook. After the performance, Vida and Heidi Julavits, both founding editors of the arts and culture magazine The Believer, discussed the work.
Set in a quiet oceanside neighborhood of San Francisco, We Run the Tides follows the story of two teenage girls who experience the changes of adolescence alongside the city’s tech-boom transformation. When a potential kidnapping shakes the idyllic neighborhood, the story becomes a compelling mystery as well as a tribute to youth.
Featured Book
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We Run the Tides
By Vendela Vida
Published by Ecco
Teenage Eulabee and her alluring best friend, Maria Fabiola, own the streets of Sea Cliff, their foggy, oceanside San Francisco neighborhood. They know the ins and outs of the homes and beaches, Sea Cliff’s hidden corners and eccentric characters—as well as the swanky all-girls’ school they attend. Their lives move along uneventfully, with afternoon walks by the ocean and weekend sleepovers. Then everything changes. Eulabee and Maria Fabiola have a disagreement about what they did or didn’t witness on the way to school one morning, and this creates a schism in their friendship. The 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 masterpiece depiction 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.
