We Can Only Save Ourselves

A Novel

De: Alison Wisdom

Narrado por: Jesse Vilinsky

"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.

©2021 Alison Wisdom (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers

Just ended

The story was beautifully written but it just ended. Like absolutely out of the blue. I enjoyed the perspective from the other mothers. Left feeling frustrated.

Abrupt Ending

Story was ok but left me wanting to know more. Curious to read other reviews.

Bold, original, mesmerizing...

Highly recommend to all. We Can Only Save Ourselves reminds me of Ishiguro’s novels, with its pared down language, enigmatic and often (though not always) well-intentioned characters caught up in a larger and darker world than they know or seem to grasp. She does not moralize, rather, Wisdom asks us to open our eyes to the unfathomable complexity of the human need to connect and belong, as well as our instinctive yearning to be free.

Depressing

Great narration. She has a gentle voice and clear speech. I spent the entire listen wanting to shake the main character to wake her up. The story is depressing. It doesn't check my boxes for true, beautiful, or even important. Reading is personal, though- this story was not my cup of tea.

Yuck. Just yuck.

Arrogant, idiotic girl in a neighborhood full of dull people decides it’s better to join a cult than accept the reality of being an ordinary person.

I typically avoid spoilers in my reviews, but I will say this, because I would have known to avoid this book had I known this: there is a grisly, vivid description of a friendly dog being killed slowly with a small knife. That alone, for me, destroys anything else that might have been worthwhile in this story.

The only good thing I can say about this is that the reader was good. A lot of different voices and she did a good job with men’s voices too which a lot of women seem to struggle with. I think it’s challenging for readers to do opposite sex characters without voices that sound like silly parody, but this one was good.

Awful

A awful book without a point and completely unsettling and odd. I will never get these hours back