Save Your Own

By Elisabeth Brink

Book Overview

Meet Gillian Cormier-Brandenburg: a virginal, narcoleptic, atheistic Harvard Divinity School student struggling to finish her Ph.D. thesis. When her fellowship is revoked, Gillian must venture outside... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0618651144
• ISBN13: 9780618651146
• Release Date: January 2006
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
• Length: 281 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 5.8"

Customer Reviews

A wonderfully funny uplifting book

I absolutely love this book, and I usually don't buy fiction, but I bought it even after getting it from the library because it's a keeper.I found myself laughing out loud on the train when I read this book. If you have ever spent any time in graduate school or with academics, you will find this book very on target. But even if you haven't, the author creates a very believable and sympathetic main character who comes to self-awareness and self-acceptance through some very funny obstacles and personal issues.

Funny, lively tale.

Gillian is in her final year at Harvard Divinity School and needs to write her thesis - but when her topic 'secular conversion' is deemed unsuitable, she sets out to prove them wrong and takes a job at a halfway house for addicted women, seeking a change. Her new position provides challenges and changes she never could have predicted - and leads her to rethink her life and very personality in this funny, lively tale. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

Absolutely Wonderful, Touching Story!!

Wow! What a great story this is. It captures the angst and insecurities that probably most of us suffer from at one time or another in a funny, loveable, laughable, and thoroughly believable person. I so enjoyed reading a story where the heroine was not some wildly-intelligent, drop-dead gorgeous chick that possesses not a whit of psychosis. I think everyone will have a hard time putting this book down. And, boy, I thought Publishers' Weekly was way off the mark on their review. Definitely a BUY, READ, and RECOMMEND!!

Hilarious, smart read

Love, love, love this book. It is clever, funny, touching and brilliantly written. I miss Gillian now that I have finished the book, and so many of the other colorful characters made their way into my heart. Will be recommending this to everyone. An absolute delight.

"Free choice is what makes us human."

The protagonist/narrator in Elisabeth Brink's" Save Your Own" describes herself as "a full-grown woman who looks like a ten-year-old boy, and not even very handsome or cute one at that." Gillian Cormier-Brandenburg is a twenty-six year old emotional wreck. Her overly controlling parents raised her to be a compulsive student and she has no friends, male or female. Gillian is enrolled in Harvard Divinity School, but her dissertation on secular conversion experiences is going nowhere; she is in danger of losing her fellowship. In addition, she suffers from narcolepsy; she tends to fall asleep during episodes of stress. In a desperate effort to get her dissertation off the ground, Gillian takes a minimum-wage job at Responsibility House, a state-subsidized residential treatment program for female drug addicts and alcoholics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What a culture shock this proves to be! Sheltered, timid, tiny Gillian suddenly finds herself trying to communicate with profane, sexually active, and aggressive women (half are former prison inmates at the women's correctional facility at Framingham) who are filled with rage and frustration. "Save Your Own" is reminiscent of Elinor Lipman's fiction in Brink's depiction of offbeat individuals who are struggling to find their place in a tumultuous and hostile world. The residents of Responsibility House are vivid and fully realized. They include Janet Tremaine, a charismatic gay woman with a formidable physique and considerable self-confidence, Florine, a former streetwalker and addict with a secret ambition to be a professional baker, and Stacy, a sadistic and resentful individual with a talent for organization and a penchant for spying on her fellow Responsibility House residents. Gillian graduates from keeping tabs on her clients to being their counselor and confidante. She even fights to win them more autonomy, since she firmly believes that "a freer, less bureaucratic society would achieve greater therapeutic results." This is an entertaining, quirky, and touching coming-of-age story in which Gillian slowly changes from a terrified and dysfunctional mouse into an articulate and compassionate adult. Brink's sardonic humor, lovely descriptive writing, and insight into the psychological lives of her characters make "Save Your Own" a satisfying debut novel.