We Can Only Save Ourselves: A Novel

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Alice Lange can’t remember a time when she wasn’t considered special. Other girls deferred to her because of her beauty and popularity, adult women held her up as a model child, and young men dreamed of being the one she dreamed about. But, in Alison Wisdom’s We Can Only Save Ourselves, we learn the secret heart of the golden girl is rarely simple or sweet.

Though many believe she has been kidnapped, Alice willingly chooses to leave the suburban idyll that has put her on a pedestal her whole life. She meets an older man, Wesley, and goes with him to live a more authentic life, one that feels truer to whom she believes she is. The novel deftly employs a second-person narrative point of view to represent the mothers and older women in Alice’s neighborhood who speculate about the girl’s life, and they simultaneously envy and resent her for getting out.

As Alice navigates her new life, she has to grapple with what she believes about loyalty, honesty, and family. Alice Wisdom has tapped into the adolescent hunger for change and transformation while edging close to the darkness that leaps around all unknown corners. We Can Only Save Ourselves is a complicated and revelatory reminder that nothing is as it seems. For fans of Emma Cline’s The Girls, this novel is a must-read.


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Author Alison Wisdom
Star Count /5
Format Trade
Page Count 336 pages
Publisher Harper Perennial
Publish Date 02-Feb-2021
ISBN 9780062996145
Bookshop.org Buy this Book
Issue August 2021
Category Popular Fiction
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