Customer Reviews

Save Your Own

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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

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!!

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.

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.

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.

I fell for it immediately. What a terrific protagonist, a great, unique female lead. I loved her and loved the book. It was a fast read with a satisfying finish. Highly recommended!

I was fortunate enough to read an advance copy of this hilarious book, and I found it original, intelligent, and truly very funny. It was a blessed relief from the standard homogenized treacle in most popular fiction. Which is why I am puzzled by the negative review Publishers Weekly gave Elisabeth Brink's "Save Your Own." The review is simply off the mark, so completely off the mark that I suspect the PW reviewer didn't quite understand that Brink's "sweet" debut book is, in fact, a satirical novel. The reviewer claimed, "Brink's heroine is developed enough to be believable," but that is an inane comment. The main character is a narcoleptic, anxious, troll-like virgin attempting to write her Harvard Divinity School thesis on secular conversion experiences. Hoping to locate a convert, she takes a job at "Responsibility House," a women's halfway house, where instead she develops a crush on the resident butch biker and alienates the other residents by indexing the house manual and enforcing the no-music-at-mealtime rule. Maybe it's just me, but doesn't this sound comic? Bravo to Brink for exploring the heavy issues of addiction, religion, and love without taking it all too seriously. I laughed a lot while reading this smart and charming book, and I highly recommend it.

The self-deprecating but sly voice of Gillian, protagonist of Save Your Own, reminded me of author Stephen McCauley's sardonic but angst-ridden characters. He's one of my favorite novelists, so after reading his back cover blurb, I was eager to read Elizabeth Brink's debut novel. (Like some of the other reader reviewers, I read an Advance Reading Copy, but I assume it's much the same as the published novel.)

Gillian is all brilliant mind but rough edges, a self-confessed ugly duckling with no social skills. But the novel by Elizabeth Brink is anything but unskilled. As several other reader reviewers have noted, it's a coming-of-age story with a twist --original, clever, wrenching, yet laugh-out-loud funny. (As the author of a comic novel about serious issues, I know that's not the easiest combination to achieve.)

Gillian narrates her own story -- which takes place in the mid-Eighties -- in the form of a memoir. In keeping with the dry academic she was raised to be by her emotionally cold, but pushy parents, crucial parts of her back-story take the form of footnotes. But her memoir is not dry reading. Rather, it's delightfully witty as she skewers her peers and parents. "When an IQ test administered in high school showed that I was not a Genius, but merely Superior, they were devastated....Nevertheless, my parents had learned the value of adaptability from studying evolution. So when it became clear that I would not be a Nobel prize-winning scientist, they flexibly shifted their focus to my becoming a Pulitzer prize-winning anything."

Chronologically in her twenties, but with a rebellious teen's relationship to Joan and Bertram (her parents since earliest childhood have forbidden her to call them Mom and Dad), Gillian spites her scientist parents by becoming a grad student at Harvard Divinity School. But only Gillian could then flout the spirit of divinity school by coming up with a dissertation topic like "secular conversion experiences."

When she takes a job as evening supervisor at a halfway house in a desperate attempt to find interview subjects for her dissertation -- and thereby avoid losing her fellowship -- Gillian faces more challenges than overseeing a dozen recovering addicts without succumbing to stress-induced narcolepsy. Among them are the need to separate emotionally from Bertram and Joan and get in touch with her own feelings. Only then can she ask herself whether it is herself or her parents that she is getting the PhD for, and whether her world will end if she simply drops out of the program. And she needs to find out what she wants out of life. As it is, there is only one thing she knows she wants with absolute clarity: to lose her virginity. But should it be with a hazel-eyed man who once righted her after an icy fall, or the biker chick who seems so temptingly available?

Brink's inventive and entertaining prose kept me turning pages. And to my delight, I found that she chose to end her novel with an old-fashioned epilogue -- written by the middle-aged Gillian, finishing up her memoir some twenty years after her stint at Responsibility House.

I agree with the reader reviewers who feel the Publisher's Weekly review that calls Save Your Own "sweet" but a "feeble debut," misses the mark. It's a coming-of-age novel with a youthful female protagonist, true, but not even close to the kind of "chick lit" that might be categorized by the word sweet. Rather, it's sharp, smart and a lot closer to satire than to sugar and spice.

Elisabeth Brink's gentle humor and wry, intellectual observations sparkle brightly when delivered through Gillian, SAVE YOUR OWN'S awkward, scholarly main character. We follow Gillian's journey from sure-of-herself Harvard Divinity School grad student struggling with her dissertation as she finally learns what life is all about. Brink has found her place among the Elinor Lipman's, Mameve Medwed's and Stephen McCauley's with this delightful debut that skirts the pain and humor of humiliation and allows her awkward main character little triumphs along the way. Truly a marvelous read that will leave you wanting more.

This debut novel by Elisabeth Brink is fresh and wonderfully original. The central character, Gillian Cormier-Brandenburg is an odd-looking (by her own account) intellectual struggling with graduate school and the commanding desire to shed her virginity. She would have blown through Harvard's Divinity School had she not embraced the unique thesis topic--secular conversion experiences. While passionate about the project her inability to find individuals who have undergone a secular conversion experience results in the termination of her elite fellowship. Forced find a job she ends up on the staff of a halfway house in Cambridge. The street smart residents offer a Gillian a different type of intellectual challenge as she is forced to deal with a cunning group of drug addicts, alcoholics and ex-convicts. Here the timid, narcoleptic virgin matches wits with a group as intense and passionate as her divinity school peers--but far more entertaining!

Brink brings her charming and profoundly human characters alive with sharp observational writing. Her intelligent and hilarious prose is a joy to read. I highly recommend this book!