We Run the Tides

By Vendela Vida
HarperCollins, 2021, 251 pages

Reviewed by Jim Stasiowski
Oct. 22, 2022

I’ve never watched the TV show “Young Sheldon.” I don’t have to. I’ve seen it.

Modern TV shows, movies, even books all portray young boys and girls the same way: as if they are brilliant, wise, common-sensical, and the adults around them are stupid, impetuous and say and do things that embarrass the kids.

So I was worried when the first sentence of Vendela Vida’s novel declares: We are thirteen, almost fourteen, and these streets of Sea Cliff are ours. I checked online, and Vida was born on Sept. 6, 1971, which is bad, bad news: She’s yet another grown-up writing about barely-teens, so I expect her to make Eulabee, Maria Fabiola, Faith and Julia – the “We” of the title and first sentence – to be smart, mature and qualified for a seat in the U.S. Senate or something truly worthwhile.

But – holy Theodore Cleaver – Vida skillfully turns her girls into real teenagers, full of sass, guile, pettiness and questionable judgment, the characteristics of adults in most novels. The girls don’t murder anyone, although their mischievous behavior in and around the (real-life) San Francisco neighborhood known as Sea Cliff causes strife both trivial and life-threatening.

Eulabee is the narrator, but the center of the girl-gang is Maria Fabiola, and, like me, you no doubt are wondering why Eulabee always says “Maria Fabiola,” never just “Maria.” When a minor character in the book uses just “Maria,” Eulabee finds the absence of “Fabiola” worth noting. I am not sure whether “Fabiola” is a last name or the second component of a compound first name, such as “Beth” in “Mary Beth” or “Paul” in “Peter Paul Almond Joy.”

When the foursome is solid, their activities are mostly physical: climbing rocks, racing around on the beaches, doing whatever goofy prank occurs to them. For instance, Eulabee lives with her parents and little sister, Svea, in a house that is very close to the house in which a high school student lives: There’s a three-foot gap between the edge of our property and his house and sometimes I leap through his open window and land on the floor of his living room. I am that daring. I am a daring enigma.

Yeah, every now and then, Vida puts an adult word, such as “enigma,” in Eulabee’s 13-year-old mouth, but notice the skill by which she does it. Like any young teen testing her limits, Eulabee is boasting, labeling herself “daring.” After a short pause, she embellishes it to “daring enigma.”

Although the foursome is tight, Eulabee considers herself and Maria Fabiola the firsts among equals. But in moments of introspection, Eulabee knows that Maria Fabiola controls the group’s moods and actions. To reinforce the sense of that control, Vida hints that Maria Fabiola’s physical development was taking place more rapidly than the others’.

One morning, three of them – Eulabee, Maria Fabiola and Julia – are walking to Faith’s house on the way to the private, all-girls elementary school in their neighborhood. They pass a white car with a young man sitting inside it. When the man asks the group for the time, Eulabee checks her watch and answers him.

As the girls are continuing toward Faith’s home, Maria Fabiola announces that as they were passing, she saw the man stroking his penis. Julia enthusiastically agrees, but Eulabee balks. Maria Fabiola and Julia tell the story to Faith, who accepts it despite Eulabee’s insistence that she saw a man but didn’t see any stroking or any penis.

The school’s authorities call the police, who investigate but decide that Eulabee’s version is correct.

As will happen to the young (and, if I’m honest, to adults, too), the discrepancy touches off petty score-settling: Eulabee is silently blackballed.

Stripped of her social prepotency, Eulabee tests her solo powers, trying things, including approaching boys (and nearly killing one).

Then one day, Maria Fabiola disappears. Kidnapping is suspected by all but Eulabee. She is convinced that Maria Fabiola, always hungry for attention, is hiding out.

Much of the book is devoted to the disappearance.

If you’ve read any of my previous reviews of novels, you’re already aware of how disgusted I am with contemporary fiction. Plot has been abandoned by most novelists; action, sadly, has been replaced by wandering, frequently pointless thinking as characters fight endless interior battles.

If characters don’t do things, they’re all going to get fat. Soon every novel will overflow with pudgy people vying to see whose thoughts are interesting enough to propel readers through 250 pages.

No such problems in “Tides.” Vida covers Eulabee’s thoughts, but most of them are connected to her going places – a concert, a party (that turns disastrous), rock-climbing, snooping, hiding – and for every action, there seem to be a number of repercussions.

The book is divided by years: The action of the first 225 pages takes place in 1984 and 1985, while the last 26 are in 2019.

I was never bored, always eager to see where Eulabee and the others were headed next. Vida’s writing is unpretentious, her imagery vivid but without ostentation. At one point, a furious Maria Fabiola confronts Eulabee over a perceived betrayal. Here is Eulabee’s description of Maria Fabiola’s tantrum: She screams a scream of frustration instead of answering. Even her hair, which has lost its hair-sprayed hold, is extending out from her head like exclamation points.

The image is brisk and funny, something too few authors master.

Late in the book, a grown-up Eulabee, visiting Italy for her job, is eating breakfast with an idle-rich fellow on vacation: He gives me a recommendation of a restaurant he loves in Naples and tells me the name of the maître d’. This is what the wealthy do, I think. They spend their expensive meals talking about other expensive meals.

Vida is the author of other novels, and as with this one, she favors playful titles. Her 2007 novel is “Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name,” and one in 2015 is, “The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty.”

With that tendency, and with her skill at inhabiting a youngster’s brain, I predict if she ever writes a TV sitcom, she’ll call it, “Leave It to Beaver.”