Mara is understandably devastated when her baby is stillborn. Unable to stay put in her grief, particularly when her brother lives just downstairs with his newborn, she leaves her husband takes off to a small beach town where everyone is a stranger and she can disappear ("She could no longer live in this fixed way: with their joy so firmly lodged beneath her grief.").

Drinking more than she eats, sleeping where opportunities arise, Mara is intentionally slipping "into a blind spot." As her money disappears and her phone shuts down, Mara's wandering takes on a small sliver of something resembling stability, if you don't look too closely, when she notices a Help Wanted sign in the window of the town wine shop.

The shop owner, Simon, is suffering his own period of loss and instability, as his wife has taken their daughter and left town. As Simon and Mara are pulled to and fro by their lives and circumstances, any sense of loveliness is overshadowed by the feeling that any crumb of good will be washed away.

Sara Freeman's debut is wonderful in spite of, often because of, the overlying sense of doom. In that way it reminded me of Billy O'Callaghan's My Coney Island Baby, in which two lovers meet for what the reader can tell, and they, over the course of the book discover, will be the last time.

Freeman takes Mara to the depths before lifting her enough to explore her past and what brought her to her current state. The writing is often spare and restrained, more impactful and beautiful for it. Freeman's prose often requires a second or third reading just for the pure enjoyment. She has a lovely way with descriptors:

...eyebrows like tadpoles swimming lazily across her forehead.

Still hot into the evening, when the sun is a red face dipping its chin into the water.

The only visible sign of life: a sliver of moon, butcher's hook looking to grab at tender flesh.

And of course passages that allow the reader to feel the tug of grief or pull of some form of recovery, the ongoing tug of war inside Mara:

She is seventeen or forty-seven or somewhere in between. She is the walking dead: the child inside her floating dangerously near the surface, gasping its final breath.

They remind her of childhood, when the world seemed to dangle from a string and adults moved around with their scissors, cutting on a whim.

At her core, in this moment in time, Mara firmly believes that "to hope is to lose." Although a shell of herself, filled with grief and absent hope or caring what befalls her, Mara also radiates a form of strength. Perhaps simply because she's still moving, making even tenuous connections, after the loss she has suffered. Where the tide will take her or shake into or out of her next is a mystery.

Sometimes she wonders what might have happened if she'd been born less flawed, if she'd turned, on occasion, right instead of left. Maybe then she'd be more like [her brother], not a bay stripped bare by the tides, all the scum and rocks and dented plastic bottles on hideous display.

I adored Freeman's writing and her creation of Mara and can't recommend them highly enough. Plus this cover is simply gorgeous. If I were one to do star ratings, Tides would get all the stars.

2 stars (published Jan 16)

**Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.**

WARNING: The "sudden devastating loss" is the loss of a child during pregnancy. I don't think this should be a spoiler because no one should accidentally read this who may be sensitive to the topic. I haven't had a loss, but recently gave birth, and I wouldn't have read this if I'd known.

Pros
+ small seaside village setting with a last-outpost-at-the-edge-of-the-world feeling

Cons
- Mara: a woman running away from her family and her grief by going to a random town and making poor choices
- Simon: a local shop owner (struggling with his separation from his wife) who hires Mara
- There are SO MANY reasons why I wouldn't have picked this book up if the blurb had been more honest. The "sudden devastating loss" = stillbirth. The "possibility of a connection with Simon" involves both of them cheating, which I hate. The "slow return of her desires and appetites" has to do with NOT processing her grief but instead burying it under expensive food and illicit sex.
- The final reveal, the reason why she leaves satisfied, the reason she has to "go on living" is so cliche and really this woman just needs a mental-health hospital stay combined with therapy, seriously!
- What was the point of this book?

TW: child loss during pregnancy, separation, divorce, cheating, anorexia, homelessness, grief, pregnancy

Delicate, unique, sharp; Freeman's "Tides" is absolutely absorbing, the prose is flowing, the character feels absolutely relatable and the fact that most of the story is left open to interpretation provides with a refreshing take on womanhood and trauma.

#bookthoughts

Tides - Sara Freeman

IRL I am not a runner. Literally I mean. I am a little bit of a runner from problems. More like let me bury them under a pile of clothes where I can’t see them and only when push comes to shove and I have to clean my room will they surface again.

But for some reason I like stories about runners. About those who leave. Those who just get up and go when there’s no hope. And then find the tiniest bit of hope. A flicker. But these are the ones who don’t face hope head on. They don’t find the need to really fit, belong, to work it out for the long haul. But in a book we never really know about the long run do we? The book ends with the flicker that we believe to be true.

In life there are always flickers and it’s all upto us to make them a flame. And some of us are just not good at making flickers into flames.

I loved this book. Mara leaves, disappears after the death of her child and lands up in a sea side town, trying to escape from her thoughts and grief. She is completely without prospects until she sees a sign outside a wine shop saying help wanted. The owner Simon is like her washed up, burnt, sad. And what takes place is something that takes place between people. A fulfillment of common need for a short time.

As Mara says:

She could have said: Marriage is just a metaphor, for everything we want but cannot preserve within a single life.

It’s a short read but more and more my kind of read. Thanks to @netgalley and @groveatlantic for an earc.

#tides #netgalley #sarafreeman #bookreview #bookrecommendations #bookblogger #readersofig #arc #debutnovel

For me, a beautiful book almost always means a book that devastates me; this book is both incredibly beautiful, and also devastated me. Elegantly and sparsely written, its passages are crisp and concise, like reading the omniscient narrator’s diary entries. I could not put it down (and, in fact, put away other books to finish it over the course of less than 24 hours).

I felt little sympathy for Mara at first, even after realising quite early on what must have happened to her. Somehow, the author pulls off the trick of making Mara completely real and heartbreakingly human, taking you directly into the heart of her pain (and rather triggering me in the process, it must be said). Her triumph in the end feels like your own, too.

Pick this up if you’re into beautiful writing, and to marvel at this writer’s craft. The style is completely perfect. Also read if you don’t mind crying, as I very nearly did. Tides will probably be the most perfect book I read in 2022, and will stay with me a very long time.

Rated: 10/10.

Read if you liked/ If you liked this, you’ll also enjoy: Winter in Sokcho.

Thank you to NetGalley and to Grove Press for this ARC.

Sara Freeman's Tides is a sparse and unconventional novel of one woman's undoing--and knitting herself back together again in the most unlikely of ways.

The woman herself is unimportant at first. She remains unnamed, until Freeman reveals in a passing dialogue that her name is Mara; she is unmoored, until snippets of her past start to come back to her in memory and in conversation. This is how Mara is defined across the pages of Freeman's staggering debut, not by what she is, but by what she is not: "this is not that," she says time and again. She is not "the other her, the one she left behind," fleeing on a bus to nowhere, determined to make it to the sea. She is instead taking shape in the absence of what she was before: a sister, a daughter, a wife, a mother-to-be, turned runaway, refugee, the other woman, a squatter with ties to no one.

And yet, as Mara tries to remain aloof and alone, she is slowly knit into the fabric of the new community where she has landed, an off-season seaside town that offers her a harsh and unforgiving refuge, and reminded of the fabric of her past. As Mara asks, so does Freeman pose to her readers: Is it possible to isolate one's present from one's past? Or is the past a tide unto itself, ebbing and flowing each day, each season?

Tides unfolds across a series of vignettes, some as short as a sentence or two, some wending across pages. This pace is somewhat disquieting at first, though it eventually settles into a rhythm that feels like time itself: it is one day in early fall, the day is never-ending, the questions are many, then: blink, and it is October, it is Thanksgiving spent alone in a one-room attic apartment, it is Christmas spent in memories and walking and wine, it is a frigid and unwelcoming new year with a harsh wind blowing from the water. The beauty of Freeman's prose lies as much in this unexpected cadence as in the contrast between beauty and harshness tucked into every page; Freeman, like Mara, "can say a few words in the right order and get people to love her for a moment." In its poetic unfolding, Tides reveals itself to be a stunning and revelatory tale of the dissolution of one woman's life, her unexpected ties to the sea, and the many ways present selves are tied to their pasts. --Kerry McHugh, freelance writer

Shelf Talker: In this stunning debut novel, a woman's life unravels, builds and unravels again across a series of sparse and staggering vignettes.

Mara is suffering from a staggering loss and leaves her family for a tourist town by the sea. With little money and food, she spends her nights sleeping on the beach and walking into the water. She eventually gets a job at a wine store and finds a kinship with its equally lost owner, Simon. It's here that she starts to heal, while reworking herself into someone who learns how to live with grief and forge new love.

I’ll admit, at first I was worried that this story—written with spare language and dense with despair—was too raw for me to enjoy. But, in the end, I really liked it. Mara's struggle and eventual calm were beautifully depicted on the page. Each beat of her story, from reminisces and tragedies of her past to the dangers and joys of her present build up one by one to fill her blank-page personality into a compelling character and an intense character study.

This book at times pulses too strong with grief, but that strength leads to a growth and change for Mara that truly feels earned. An evocative book!

It's the tail-end of summer. A 30-something woman leaves her husband and immediate family to go somewhere, anywhere, in an attempt to get away from her life and herself. She leaves with more or less nothing on her person, very little money, and no clear plan. She ends up in a beach town just as everything's about to close down for the fall. As we follow her in the following months she becomes someone who gets by mostly by the grace of other people she happens to encounter. 
 
We soon learn that she's had a miscarriage not long before the start of the narrative, and is trying to cope with this loss. When we meet her she is still telling herself that none of her negative reactions are "about that". But she's filled up with negative thoughts, not least about herself, and she has decided, it seems, a long time ago that she is not worthy of most good things in life, that she is lacking somehow, compared to everyone around her. 
 
This novel is not plot-driven - I think what it's attempting, in some parts at least, is more so an exploration of loss and grief and mourning; the process of letting yourself mourn, confronting the loss and its impact on you, and beginning the journey of recovery. However, there is, I feel, still a clear enough narrative that can be followed throughout the book, with aspects of the woman's story being revealed to us slowly, in bits and pieces throughout the entirety of the novel. 
 
The very short passages/micro chapters that the book is made up of makes for a quick read. And the narrative moves in a linear fashion, so even though it might feel fragmented because of the slightly detached writing style and those short passages it is very easy to follow the story line. 
 
Overall this was and enjoyable and easy enough read, and this being a debut novel I look forward to seeing what Sara Freeman will put out in the future. 
 
Thank you to to Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for providing me with a digital copy of this book for review!

Haunting heart wrenching a woman clearly distraught arrives in a small ll town renting rooms barely surviving.We find out she has recently lost her pregnancy fled Canada for the US.She drinks she smokes can barely take care of herself.I was completely caught up in her story the lyrical writing will be recommending.#netgalley #tides

A portrait of grief. Mara leaves her home and family behind in Canada after the loss of her child and ends up in a coastal town in the US, adrift. She works low level subsistence jobs and then she meets Simon. He owns a wine shop and is struggling with the dissolution of his marriage. They spend time together, drink a lot, and share. To be honest, not much happens- it's character rather than plot driven- and the details either loom large or are hazy. Much depends on what the reader brings to the novel. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. For fans of literary fiction.

Thanks to Netgalley and Grove Press for the ebook. Mara shows up at a seaside town just as the summer season is ending and a chill is in the air. She’s left her family after a great loss. Her cell phone is not working and she’s running out of money when she gets hired on at a wine store. The owner, Simon, who has his own family complications, slowly brings Mara back to life with his quiet decency and their tentative affair. Mara starts to feel like she is coming back to life, but her recovery is more precarious then she imagines.

This didn't really work for me, unfortunately. It felt very fragmented and the language often lacked precision; instead, the images created seemed illogical or just poorly drawn. There was also a fraught sibling dynamic in here that I did not particularly enjoy or understand its purpose in the novel. Readers who enjoy really interior novels about a depressed woman may enjoy this more than I did, but I'm not sure I would recommend it to most readers. Thank you, though, to Grove Press for providing me with a free early copy of this work in exchange for an honest review.

Any woman who has experienced pregnancy difficulty, addiction or loss will understand how difficult it is to read about that in a book. Tides by Sara Freeman expresses the fall-out, depression and anguish in a numb, plodding, stream-of-consciousness kind-of way. I actually appreciate that too. It helped me sympathize with Mara without becoming overwhelmed myself. This is a story about a woman finding her way out of the darkness of grief and starting over. It's not a happy upbeat book but it is honest and you come to identify with and hope for Mara. Themes include: transformation, redemption and reinvention.

This book won't be for everyone but if you have ever been in the main character's situation, it is so poignant it hurts. I could actually feel that last page. If you're looking for a happy, feel-good tale this isn't it but I respect the author's ability to get that feeling down on the page.

We don’t know her name right away. She’s just “she,” and she is on a bus bound for somewhere else. She doesn’t really care where she’s going as long as it’s away from where she was. She comes to a small resort town on a lake somewhere in the upper Midwest with a few dollars in her pocket, the clothes on her back, and no real plan for what comes next.

We get clues right away that something is very wrong, that a trauma has been suffered. But the clues about the baby and the husband and the brother and sister-in-law left behind are not carefully delineated. “She” checks into the cheapest lodgings, a hostel where a lot of the summer help lives, and begins work at disappearing.

But she can’t completely. She needs money so she finds odd jobs. But she keeps all others at arm’s length and when the summer winds down she is faced with a closing hostel and no place to stay anymore. So her present self goes forth finding a job at the wine shop in town and secretly bunking in the storage room above, and all the while her interior landscape is pulled, like the tides, back to the past where we gradually learn her name (Mara), and her sad story.

Told in micro-fiction chapters that create a mosaic of a whole, Sara Freeman draws a portrait of a woman who is troubled by more than just losing her baby and husband. Little by little the picture forms of Mara, and her life before her arrival in the resort town. As she subsumes her past she plunges ahead into her present where she continues on a path of self-destruction.

This book was so beautiful to read. The tiny portions give us tesserae of the story so when you finish you’re surprised to be holding a fully-realized narrative in your hands. It’s a remarkable feat, and a lyrical story, well crafted.

Tides will be released in bookstores on January 16, 2022.

In Tides we follow a woman who escapes to a town by the ocean and we follow her life there as she tries to cope and live her life there. Overall this book just wasn't for me and therefore I don't think this rating or review will be a particularly helpful indication to others on whether they should pick it up or not. This book is written in a very stripped back and fragmented way, and I just couldn't get into the story. I do think this writing style will suit lots of other people who really enjoy books written in this way, but for me it was just a no.

Thank you to Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for sending me an advanced copy

Tides is beautifully written - a meditation on grief and dissonance that does a wonderful job of capturing the spirit and sense of its protagonist. Mara has run away from her family and herself following a devastating personal loss, the full details of which, however, are not entirely clear. The setting – a wealthy coastal town at the end of the summer season – perfectly captures her fraying internal conflict. From such a strange and dislocated set-up the novel takes a relatively conventional storyline from about two-thirds in. Still, this is captivating. Easy to see why Sara Freeman has been so lauded - very much looking forward to seeing what comes next. 4.5 stars.

This book has a very distinct style and cadence. But, it’s not one that I could settle into. Ultimately, I didn’t finish this one.