We Loved to Run

Praise

“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