From "At the Edge of the Haight" to "Running the Tides" at San Francisco's Sea Cliff

As regular readers know, I live in San Francisco (well, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge), and work there (except during these pandemic times, during which I work from home). I love the city and the Bay Area. I am always happy to read novels set in San Francisco. Very recently, without planning it, I found myself reading two new novels set there. Both are about girls/young women living in San Francisco, but their lives are very different. The main character in “At the Edge of the Haight” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2021), by Katherine Seligman, is 20-year-old Maddy, who is homeless, estranged from her family, and lives mostly in Golden Gate Park. The novel portrays her life, and those of her young companions, in a (seemingly, at least) realistic way that such lives are seldom portrayed. Although one worries about Maddy, she is strong and admirable in many ways. The story contains a mystery - a death to which Maddy is a witness - and is compelling. The other novel, which I read immediately after the first one, is “We Run the Tides” (Ecco, 2021), by Vendela Vida, who is active in San Francisco literary circles. Her young heroine, Eulabee, aged 13, lives in the affluent Sea Cliff neighborhood of San Francisco, overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and the ocean. Although from a middle class family, less affluent than many of their neighbors, she attends an elite private girl’s school, a barely disguised version of an actual school in that area. She and her friends are privileged. But, as with Maddy, there are undercurrents, problems, and frightening situations in their lives. Both novels deal with young women’s lives, families, friendships, entanglements, insecurities, and fears. Both girls/young women are strong. Eulabee’s life is certainly not as hard as Maddy’s, and she is fortunate not only in her schooling and friends but also in her close family. But in some ways the similarities, especially their vulnerabilities as young females, jump out at the reader as much as the differences. Both novels and, especially, their settings felt very familiar to me in some ways. The setting of the first one, in the Haight and the East (grubbier) end of Golden Gate Park, is only a few blocks from the university where I teach. The setting of the other novel is also familiar to me from when I lived in an adjacent (middle-class) San Francisco neighborhood, many years ago, before I moved north of the Bridge. The school that Eulabee attended is known as the rival of the other best-known all-girls private school in the city, the one that my daughter attended. Both writers allude to well-known areas and personalities (e.g., Danny Glover, the late Robin Williams) in the city. But I admire both books not just because of their familiar San Francisco settings, but mainly because each is well-written, and “gets” the lives of young women, no matter their socioeconomic status.