We Can Only Save Ourselves
A Novel
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
"Alison Wisdom's addictive, down-the-rabbit-hole debut reads like The Girls by way of The Virgin Suicides, with an extra dash of Cheever's unsettling suburbia. The result is sinister and surprising: a novel I couldn't put down, and one that I kept thinking about long after I'd reached its unexpected, chilling end." —Emily Temple, author of The Lightness
One of Newsweek, Bustle, and LitHub's Most Anticipated Books and Goodreads' "Debut Novels to Discover in 2021," We Can Only Save Ourselves is the story of one
teenage girl’s unlikely indoctrination and the reverberations in the tight-knit
community she leaves behind.
Alice Lange’s neighbors are proud to know her—a high-achieving
student, cheerleader, and all-around good citizen, she’s a perfect emblem of
their sunny neighborhood. The night before she’s expected to
be crowned Homecoming Queen, though, she commits an act of vandalism, then
disappears, following a magnetic stranger named Wesley to a bungalow in another
part of the state. There, he promises, Alice can be her true self, shedding the
shackles of conformity.
At the bungalow, however, she learns
that four other young women seeking enlightenment and adventure have already
followed him there. Her new lifestyle is intoxicating at first, but as Wesley’s
demands on all of them increase, the house becomes a pressure cooker—until one
day they reach the point of no return.
Back home, the story of Alice’s
disappearance and radicalization is framed by the first-person plural chorus of
the mothers who knew her before, who worry about her, but also resent the tear
she made in the fabric of their perfect world, one that exposes the question: Isn’t
suburbia a kind of cult unto itself?
Combining the sharp social
critique of Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere with the elegiac beauty
of Emma Cline’s The Girls, this is a fierce literary debut from a writer
to watch.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Wisdom's captivating if slight debut, a suburban high school girl joins an antiestablishment cult. The night before Alice Lange is expected to be crowned homecoming queen in her tight-knit town, she and her friends break into the high school, and Alice, stirred by the desire to "do something," sets fire to a float. Then she leaves town with the mysterious Wesley, whose power and charisma holds a spell over Alice and a group of women living in a nearby desert bungalow. The narrative, set in an unspecified past of corded phones, is propelled by Wesley's "grand awakening" vision of the danger inherent in America's violent society, and becomes increasingly unsettling fter Wesley claims to know a serial killer responsible for the death of a teenager from Alice's town. While the unresolved ending and nondescript setting add little to the familiar Manson-esque motif, Wisdom does a good job differentiating the personalities of the women in Wesley's orbit, as well as the mothers left behind. Fans of cult stories will appreciate this.
