We Can Only Save Ourselves by Alison Wisdom

We Can Only Save Ourselves by Alison Wisdom

"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.

Wisdom, Alison: - Born, raised, and based in Houston, Texas, Alison Wisdom has an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, received a novel-writing grant from Wedgwood Circle, and was a finalist for this year's Rona Jaffe Award. She has attended Tin House and the Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where she was a finalist for the Emerging Writers Fellowship. Alison's short stories have been published in Ploughshares, Electric Literature, The Rumpus, Indiana Review, and more.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780062996145
ISBN 10	0062996142
Title	We Can Only Save Ourselves
Author	Alison Wisdom
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	2021-02-02
Number of pages	336
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.