How To Save A Life

How to Save a Life is a realistic young adult novel by Sara Zarr. It was a major financial and critical success when it was published in 2011, winning several awards and readers’ choice prizes. These include placement on the Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2011 and ALA Top Ten Best Fiction for Young Adults lists.
Jill McSweeney is one of the novel’s main characters. She is a teenage girl from a privileged family who is popular at school and planning for college. All of that changes when her father is killed in a car accident. Jill begins to withdraw from her friends, family, and boyfriend. Her mother Robin is also in mourning, and in her grief, decides to adopt a child.

As Jill learns more about her mother’s plans, she is concerned about the adoption. Robin has made arrangements without the aid of an adoption agency or intermediary, and Jill’s family does not know anything about the child’s mother or why she is placing her baby up for adoption. Jill is worried that Robin is making a mistake in her eagerness to replace their dead family member with a new one.

The other main character of the novel is Mandy Kalinowski. Mandy is Jill’s age, a high school dropout, and pregnant. She met the baby’s father at a party and became pregnant after a very brief romance. The father is not in the picture and Mandy is faced with raising the baby in her unstable and abusive home. She believes that Robin can give the child a better life than she could, and so has arranged for the adoption.



Jill and Robin pick up a pregnant Mandy at the train station. One of her stipulations for Robin being allowed to adopt is that she be allowed to see the home her baby will be living in. Jill takes an immediate dislike to Mandy, who she finds vapid and rather simple. In fact, Mandy has lived a very different life and not been given the same opportunities as Jill.

The family settles into a routine. Robin takes Mandy to a doctor appointment where they discover that some of the information that Mandy gave about the baby is not true. The doctor suspects that the child was actually conceived slightly later than Mandy had assumed. Robin agrees to let Mandy stay with the family until the baby is born so that she can hand it over to Robin immediately after birth.

Meanwhile, Jill is struggling to reconnect with her friends , having been distant from them since her father’s death. She again becomes intimate with her long-term boyfriend Dylan, but also finds herself attracted to an older college student from work named RT. Dylan suggests that Jill hire RT to investigate Mandy and her claims in order to set her mind at ease. Jill agrees because she wants to know more about where her new younger sister is coming from.



RT finds several disturbing things as he looks into Mandy’s family history. Mandy’s mother is poor and works long hours to provide for her family. She has a boyfriend named Kent who has been sexually abusing Mandy. Though Mandy initially thought that her baby belonged to a boy she met at a party, the new due date the doctor gave her makes her worry that Kent is the baby’s father.

This information causes both Robin and Jill to see Mandy in a new light. Mandy confesses that she wants to be a mother but feels that she must get rid of her baby so that it can grow up safely. Though she is ashamed of her family and thinks she will be rejected, Robin assures her that she still wants to adopt the baby regardless of who the father is. She also agrees to adopt Mandy so that she can be safe and still spend time around her child.

Everyone pulls together as the baby’s due date nears. Jill becomes friends with Mandy and Dylan pitches in to help buy baby clothes and set up the nursery. Mandy thinks about reconnecting with Christopher, the boy her own age who she originally thought was the baby’s father.



The baby is born and welcomed into the family. Mandy is relieved that the baby looks like Christopher and not like Kent. At the end of the novel, she and Jill set out together to see if they can locate Christopher and rekindle his relationship with Mandy.

How to Save a Life switches points of view between the two main characters, Mandy and Jill. In this way, the reader becomes acquainted with both girls’ thoughts and feelings about each other and the situation. By allowing both characters to speak, a fuller picture of their very different lives begins to emerge.