Saving Five: A Memoir of Hope
Amanda Nguyen

One woman’s journey through grief and pain, her resilience and strength, her refusal to be a number in a broken judicial system, all coming together to institute change worldwide to benefit survivors of rape, providing them a Bill of Rights.

I don’t know if it is appropriate to call beautiful the story of something so heinous. Saving Five is a powerful, awe-inspiring memoir that proves that (while): <i>"We can’t change the things that happen to us, but the greatest power we have is to choose how we react. And you can react to change the world. We are the architect of our life, our own experience.”</i>

Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an advanced copy used in this review.

5 stars

Amanda Nguyen has done incredible things for survivors across the country as one of the activists who helped pass the Sexual Assault Survivors' Bill of Rights. This is a memoir of her journey in getting involved in this activism through the Bill's passage. It begins almost immediately after her assault, and ends with the bill's passage.

It is hard to rate a memoir of someone with such a unique and powerful story. Many instinctually give memoirs like these five stars because of the work the author has done outside of the book itself. It is hard not to compare this memoir with the most notable memoir of a sexual assault survivor, Know My Name by Chanel Miller, and I am sorry to say that this does not hold a candle to that one. The writing is fine, and the story is well told, but it feels a bit surface level. Things happen quickly, as to be expected in only 224 pages, and the reader does not have the chance to get to know Amanda deeply. I appreciate that the topic is very personal, and she does not need to go into detail about her assault itself. I think the story of her path from survivor to activist could have gone a bit deeper, however.

The book's title comes from a beautiful analogy sprinkled throughout the book of the author's self at different ages interacting with one another. This is, in my opinion, where the book shines. We are around the same age, and I loved the idea of her current self helping her past selves, because you do learn in your thirties that you were such a different person at 22 than you are now. Amanda went through more trauma than just her assault, and this story within the memoir is her way to tell her traumas without explaining them, if that makes sense. I really appreciated this, and I feel it was her best work.

This memoir will sell numerous copies because of Nguyen's activist work and because she became an astronaut afterward. These are both highly commendable, but I sadly don't think this memoir will have as much sticking power as expected.

The book is not narrated by the author, but the epilogue is. The epilogue is truly beautiful, and it did make me tear up. The audiobook is very well done and I appreciated the narrator, but that touch really added a lot for me.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest review.