num_pages: 336
description: With echoes of The Virgin Suicides and The Fates Will Find Their Way Alison Wisdoms debut novel is the story of one teenage girls unlikely indoctrination and the reverberations in the tight-knit community she leaves behind.Alice Langes neighbors are proud to know hera high-achieving student cheerleader and all-around good citizen shes a perfect emblem of their sunny neighborhood. The night before shes 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 Wesleys demands on all of them increase the house becomes a pressure cookeruntil one day they reach the point of no return.Back home the story of Alices 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: Isnt suburbia a kind of cult unto itself?Combining the sharp social critique of Celeste Ngs Little Fires Everywhere with the elegiac beauty of Emma Clines The Girls this is a fierce literary debut from a writer to watch.
language: None
title: We Can Only Save Ourselves
publisher: Harper Perennial