I liked the premise of reading the stories of this cross country team and what they do to have the body that will perform the best and fastest on race day. I struggled a little bit on the long chapter where we heard Kristen’s story about Jeb. It felt like there was some info that wasn’t really needed for the story.
That being said, I enjoyed the camaraderie and drama portrayed between the girls. Life is hard, especially as a young woman finding herself and learning boundaries with men.

We Loved to Run follows the members of a women's cross country team at Frost (an Amherst-like small college) in the early 1990s, in the wake of the Clarence Thomas hearings. The book is a love letter (and a hate letter at times) to running. It's sometimes told from the collective "we" of the top runners on the team, and sometimes from a few of them as individuals, so it can feel a little disjointed. But it's overall enjoyable. The book does get into some dark topics, including rape and eating disorders. And it takes a long time to get there. The characters are not always likable, but they are real and you can see they still have some growing up to do. I wish we learned a little more about Patricia and Liv.

On female friendship and 90's nostalgia, it was a stark and tender reflection on the struggles of girlhood during that time. Though I wish the perspectives at the forefront had been more balanced between the girls, still enjoyed my time in this story and would definitely recommend! A fantastic debut novel with poignant writing and I'd love to read more from this author again.

Although I am not a runner, I still loved this stunner of a book about a team of college cross-country runners and their experiences in college in the 90s.

A powerful, quietly devastating look at young women coming-of-age, ambition, and the traumas they experienced. Told through six perspectives, almost with a stream of consciousness feel to it, this novel captures the complexity of being a young woman when everything feels like it matters too much.

There are these two major themes captured that at times are contrary to each other in the most wonderful way. Firstly, the love of running, the love of winning, the competition, the strive to be the best. Secondly, the trauma of their youth - the novel goes deep on eating disorders and sexual assault. The topics are heavy and written so beautifully and thoughtfully. I love that none of the characters were any one thing - both broken and strong, both traumatized and victorious.

This one has a pace that you want to sink into and linger with the words on the page and feel the feelings described. So thought-provoking - highly recommend.

Thank you Netgalley and Randomhouse/Hogarth Books for access to this eARC.

The beginning of the story flowed well and it was easy to invest in the narratives of each girl. By the middle, the focus on just Kristin and her trauma dragged on and took away from what the author built. At a certain point I was invested in finding out about how any of the girl’s stories turned out. This book had a lot of potential, but lost sight of the focus midway.

I've never been a runner but I think anyone can relate to this lovely novel about a group of friends at Frost. These six women are the best runners in college and are always trying to beat each other while still remaining friends. The focus settles on Kristin who receives an odd letter from an ex and things change in a heartbeat! It's a beautiful tribute to friendships and rivalries that we have all probably faced at one time in our lives.
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!

What a book! WOW! I requested this book off netgalley when I saw it had to do with running. Running is something I’ve always loved and always will. This book took a deep dive into a women’s cross country college team. It really went into the physical and mental mind of a runner and everything a woman endures in the sport. This book was heavy at times and did touch on some subjects that were tough to read but were real life things when I went to college too. It shed some light on how women in general are put through so much from sports to real life. I liked this book a lot and really just loved how well it was written.

This brought me back to my last two years of high school and when I truly fell in love with running. Going from finishing last some races and all the way in the back my freshmen and sophomore year of hs and hating running. To my junior and senior year of hs - finishing with the A group, finishing fifth in a race, and going to sectionals really changed my entire outlook on running. Running has always taught me one of the biggest lessons I take with me everyday in this life - you get what you put into it. The harder you work, the more you’ll keep improving and bettering yourself. I can attest to that going from a 31 minute 5k to a 22:30 5k & with so many aspects of my life. I just love running so this was a must read of course for me!

I highly recommend checking this one out! Thank you random house and netgalley for my ebook copy that comes out August 26, 2025.

I loved the idea of this book. As a former runner, though not part of a team. the storyline appealed to me. Unfortunately, this one was a dnf for me. I can't quite pinpoint it, but there was something in the writing style that I didn't love.

**We Loved to Run** by Stephanie Reents is a beautifully written, reflective novel that explores ambition, friendship, and the complicated ties that bind us to our dreams. Reents captures the physical and emotional intensity of running while also digging deep into the inner lives of her characters. It's a thoughtful, moving story that celebrates both the thrill of pushing yourself and the vulnerability that comes with truly connecting to others.

I read this right on the back of Natural Beauty by Lingling Huang, which is a weird readalike but they do kind of fit together (although I'm not sure I would recommend them to people who liked one or the other). I loved the different perspectives in this. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Thank you @netgalley and @randomhouse for this ARC. I read this one in less than 24 hours and found it engaging, challenging, hopeful, and inspiring. The six fastest women on the Frost cross country team are navigating their very different backgrounds and perspectives, body images, relationships, coaches, and secrets that define and terrify them. Only together, by facing the darkest moments that haunt them, are they able to move forward in the strength that comes from sisterhood and the shared goal of winning a race.

#netgalleyreviewer #netgalley #netgalleyreads #arcreader #arcreviewer #welovedtorun #summerreads

This book is for any "retired" runners who grew up in the cross country and track world. This book captures the essence of the 90s, and of the body image struggles, of the way life was before the internet fully took over, and of the way a team is only as strong as each of its members. As the reader, we saw it all, their college classes, training, the wins, the parties, their insecurities, their injuries, and most distinctly their fears. This book is captivating in a way that I have not read before. Even though I was a college athlete, this gave a whole new perspective. I would recommend this book to women athletes for sure.

This book hit me hard in the way it captured girlhood and how much pressure we put on ourselves to be everything at once. I loved the messy closeness of the team (and it was reminiscent of my own experiences) and the way competition and care lived side by side. The collective voice worked beautifully IMO.. It’s nostalgic, sharp, and a little heartbreaking in all the right ways. Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book has a quiet kind of intensity that surprised me. We Loved to Run follows six college women on a 1990s cross-country team as they train, compete, and unravel, physically, emotionally, and socially. It’s about friendship, ambition, girlhood, and the hidden toll of trying to be the best, all written with a poetic, reflective tone.

There’s something really raw and real in how Stephanie Reents portrays their relationships. The love, the tension, the unspoken pain. I appreciated the exploration of body image, identity, and trauma, and how layered each character felt. There are content warnings for disordered eating and sexual assault, and while they’re handled with care, they still hit hard.

I will say the shifting POVs and occasional collective “we” narration threw me off a bit. Some of the voices blurred together, especially in the middle, and I found myself wanting a little more clarity and grounding in certain chapters. A few scenes could have been trimmed, but that didn’t take away from the emotional depth the story aimed for.

Overall, this felt like a love letter to both the brutality and beauty of women’s sports and the inner lives of young women striving to be something more. If you’re in the mood for something introspective, quietly tense, and emotionally layered, We Loved to Run might just hit the spot.

This is another book with an East Coast college setting, but with a twist that makes it more interesting: a cross country team. This book is set in the 1990s and centers on a team of elite women runners who compete in cross country. As a runner, I enjoyed (and was drawn to) the running themes- training above all else, constant workouts, eating to run better, etc. Those themes were interesting, but the book really was about the relationships between these women.
Characters Kristin and Danielle’s stories are the focus of the book, with due weight given to lesser characters on the team. At times, there were just too many minor characters to follow- characters who never became a focus of the story.
While my favorite narrative was the team dynamic and the sports focus, the book also explored sexual assault in the 1990s. This started out as a minor focus but exploded near the end. This was an important theme, but because there were so many stories within this story, it doesn’t seem to get the attention it deserves.
This is a very readable and interesting book and I look forward to more books from this author.
Thank you NetGalley for an Advance Reader Copy.

As a former high school and college cross-country runner, this book grabbed me from the title. Frost College's women's cross country team is ready to win a championship. Their best runners, Chloe, Kristin, Liv, Harriet, Patricia, and team captain Danielle, are ready. However, all the women are facing their own challenges in addition to the team turmoil. Overall, I really enjoyed this novel and felt connected to many of the characters. There are some tough topics, including sexual assault, disordered eating, and binge drinking, in addition to the waxing and waning of female friendships. This book comes with some trigger warnings, but it also covers topics relevant to a group of female friends under pressure to perform at a collegiate level. I am already looking forward to more by Stephanie Reents!

“We Loved to Run”, told from dual perspectives, is the story of the six star runners on a liberal arts school’s cross country team as they fight for the 1992 New England Division Three Championships. The two main characters the story focuses on are Danielle, the team captain and Kristin who is turning into the fastest girl on the team as she runs to escape an incident she experienced over summer break.

This book is about running, teamwork, ambition …. and 90s perspectives on alcoholism, disordered eating, and sexual assault. It’s propulsive (in a way that, for me at least, literary fiction rarely is) and transportive and really makes you feel like you are on a cross country team with these women.

I found myself confused at times about what was going on, what I was supposed to clearly understand versus what was being eluded to, and what was going on within the minds and lives of the four runners who are heavily featured but don’t have chapters told from their perspectives. But I think maybe that was intentional. After all, it’s confusing inside the heads of college students.

I’d recommend this book to readers who enjoy literary campus novels, running, and/or “Friday Night Lights”, but you should be sure you can handle the trigger warnings I mentioned above before picking up this book.

The first-person plural ("we") narration of WE LOVED TO RUN by Stephanie Reents was initially why I wanted to consider this book for one of my creative writing classes. Parts of the novel were very effective and the running team as a "we" was compelling. The characters felt underdeveloped even with the POV switches. Ultimately, I never connected with the group or the individual characters. The eating disorders and sexual assault make this very hard to use in a class; the triggers are intense. This will be a book I recommend on an individual basis, determined by what the novel can help the student learn.

The book explores the challenges young women face, both in sports and in life, and how powerful it is when they come together for a shared goal. The focus is on six team members in the women’s cross country team, which means six POVs. Some characters had more focus than others, which meant there were a lot of storylines that were either tied up quickly or left open-ended. Overall, a good and emotional read to get that adrenaline rush to run again.

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an ARC and provide an honest review.

We Loved to Run is nominally about a tight knit group of women runners at an elite east coast college. However, while cross-country running is the glue that holds the story together, the book is much more than a story about running. It’s about the lives of this group of women: how they connect and disconnect; what drives each of them; how their life stories and back stories unfold.

I felt as though I had a new understanding of running as a sport having read this book. Moreover, I felt I knew enough about the characters to wonder what happened to them once their college running days were over. Did they stay connected? How did their lives unfold after graduation and how were their lives affected by the experience of being so closely knit for several years?

I received this book as an ARC from the publisher and NetGalley.