We Run the Tides is dedicated to Vida’s childhood friends and teachers, and she notes that they all will “immediately recognize” her book to be fiction despite any apparent parallels. The stakes at that age are already too high, and Maria Fabiola forces them even higher. The disagreement marks the end of their friendship, forming a rift from which there can be no return. Maria Fabiola later reports the incident to the principal, a story which Eulabee refuses to corroborate. Maria Fabiola swears he was masturbating. One morning, while walking to school, Eulabee and Maria Fabiola are approached by a man in a white car. The traces of Patty Hearst, of the Manson murders, of the Zodiac Killer have not been fully excised.
Beneath the tranquil and privileged surface of We Run the Tides an undercurrent gathers force. Vida has said that her first three novels belonged to a triptych examining violence and rage, but the door does not seem to have been closed so firmly. Eulabee and Maria Fabiola, who have lived in Sea Cliff all their lives, who are anxious to be older than they are, “own these streets” and the nearby beaches. They have loving but preoccupied parents. They spend their time talking about boys, shopping for cheap bracelets, and going to the movies. Their days are eventful in the way that everything is momentous at 13: much of what happens may be mundane, but it is thrilling regardless because it is new. The wide, quiet blocks form their whole world and act as a barricade against which each girl strains. The year is 1984, a decade after Hearst’s abduction, and Eulabee and Maria Fabiola are best friends living in Sea Cliff, a wealthy neighborhood in San Francisco whose placid streets seem as ripe for a lemonade stand as for a murder. Hearst is not the subject of Vendela Vida’s new novel, We Run the Tides (Ecco), but in a story of vulnerability and the disappearance of girlhood, she looms large, nonetheless. Her kidnapping enthralled the nation: a privileged heiress turned urban guerrilla the fears of a decade manifested in a body.
After more than 18 months of search and speculation, she was found in San Francisco’s Mission District and was charged with bank robbery. The men and women who stormed her home and beat up her fiancé were part of the Symbionese Liberation Army, a group which Hearst would later join. ON THE EVENING of February 4, 1974, Patty Hearst, the granddaughter of the newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley.
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