We Loved to Run - by Stephanie Reents (Hardcover)

Book Synopsis

A fearless debut novel about a women's cross country team and how far girls will push themselves to control their bodies, friendships, and futures

"This novel is a wild, brave run through the dark, and the ending might stir you to tears."--Eric Puchner, New York Times bestselling author of Dream State

We loved running because it was who we were, who we'd been in high school, who we hoped to be in futures we couldn't yet imagine. Strong and fast. Fast and strong.

At Frost, a small liberal arts college in Massachusetts, the runners on the women's cross country team have their sights set on the 1992 New England Division Three Championships and will push themselves through every punishing workout and skipped meal to achieve their goal. But Kristin, the team's star, is hiding a secret about what happened over the summer, and her unpredictable behavior jeopardizes the girls' chance to win. Team Captain Danielle is convinced she can restore Kristin's confidence, even if it means burying her own past. As the final meet approaches, Kristin, Danielle, and the rest of the girls must transcend their individual circumstances and run the race as a team.

Told from the perspective of the six fastest team members, We Loved to Run deftly illuminates the impossible standards young women set for themselves in spite of their own powerlessness. With startling honesty and boundless empathy, Stephanie Reents reveals how girls--even those in competition--find ways to love and defend one another.

Review Quotes

"Reents has written a new kind of campus novel: a funny, inventive, warmhearted portrait of a college cross-country team that begins as an insightful exploration of human competitiveness and becomes a moving ode to surviving trauma through female friendship and collective action. What do you owe to yourself? And what do you owe to your teammates, in a world that's bent on driving women into the ground? This novel is a wild, brave run through the dark, and the ending might stir you to tears."--Eric Puchner, New York Times bestselling author of Dream State

"Pulled tense with all the beauty, strength, and desperation of youth, We Loved to Run is a stunner of a novel. It's as gorgeous and ferocious as the sport at its center, covering miles in the lives of the star runners on a college cross-country team. This book is muscles in motion and hearts spilled out. It's a tribute to what the body can do, what it suffers, and how it survives."--Julia Phillips, bestselling author of Bear and Disappearing Earth

"We Loved to Run is at once a propulsive read and an intimate exploration of the ways young women navigate relationships with their bodies, their desires, their anger, their tenderness, their fears, and--perhaps most fearsome of all--their power. Whether or not you've ever been in their shoes, the six teammates at the heart of this novel, and the torturous, rapturous experience of racing together, are made vivid through Stephanie Reents's exquisite prose."--Leah Hager Cohen, author of Strangers and Cousins

"I was moved and captivated by this elite crew of complicated, intense, altogether real college athletes. Through a riveting behind-the-scenes look at the world of competitive cross-country running, Stephanie Reents explores the tenuous magic of teamwork, the varied assaults--from both men and women--to women's bodies, and the varied ways we right our wrong turns. You will love We Loved to Run."--Daphne Kalotay, author of The Archivists

"We Loved to Run jumps out of the gates and doesn't let up, not even for a second--it's blistering, it's unputdownable. With razor-sharp wit, compassion, and knowing insight, Reents interrogates identity, sacrifice, friendship, the marriage between pleasure and pain, and the pressure cooker of college sports, of the desire for greatness, of the price we pay for our ambition."--Marisa Crane, author of A Sharp Endless Need

"I couldn't stop reading We Loved to Run. It's propulsive, breath-stealing, heartbreaking, and intensely human, an examination of the secrets we keep--even from ourselves--and a group portrait of women who are strong and fierce and vulnerable, whose determination to win is matched by their loyalty to one another. A poet of speed, a chronicler of exhilaration, Stephanie Reents reminds us that why we run, and what we run from, ultimately matter less than what, or whom, we choose to run to."--Andrew Altschul, author of The Gringa

About the Author

Stephanie Reents is the author of The Kissing List, a collection of stories that was an Editors' Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and I Meant to Kill Ye, a bibliomemoir chronicling her journey into the strange void at the heart of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian. She has twice received an O. Henry Prize for her short fiction. Reents received a BA from Amherst College, where she ran on the cross country team all four years; a BA from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar; and an MFA from the University of Arizona. She was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University.