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We Can Only Save Ourselves
We Can Only Save Ourselves | Alison Wisdom
3 posts | 3 read | 4 to read
With echoes of The Virgin Suicides and The Fates Will Find Their Way, Alison Wisdom's debut novel 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.
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samantharoberts
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Panpan

Slightly upset that I wasted a couple hours of my Saturday reading this. I almost bailed a couple of times but was dying to see if the ending saved the book … it didn‘t 😔 oh well at least it‘s another TBR that can be crossed off the list!

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TheLibrarian
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Panpan

Hooray - I made it through this book!! 🤣

This book was a drag. It‘s been compared to the The Virgin Suicides (yay!) and The Girls (meh) but for a lot of reasons, it doesn‘t even compare. Most “cult” fiction books I‘ve read are meh, so if you have any recommendations, please tag them for me!

TW: animal cruelty

BookishMarginalia I hated The Girls. 3y
TheLibrarian @BookishMarginalia You would definitely hate this book. This made The Girls look better in my opinion 😱 3y
BookishMarginalia 😳😳😳 3y
vivastory Seeing you mention cult fiction reminds me that I need to read Courtney Summers latest, although I've heard so many negative reviews... 3y
TheLibrarian @vivastory I didn‘t mind that one - it was definitely a faster pace than this one. The Project wasn‘t as good as Sadie though (in my opinion). 3y
49 likes5 comments
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RidgewayGirl
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Bailedbailed

Abandoned. Between the present tense, being told in the first person plural and characters pulled from central casting, it felt good to let this one go.