Marlena

Wonderfully haunting, and engaging; Marlena will appeal to both readers of young adult and literary fiction. Alternating between Cat's year in a new town, befriending the neighbor girl Marlena, and present day in New York City where she's struggling to maintain her married, working life without spiraling back into alcoholism, this book is exquisitely and beautifully rendered. Even though Cat finds herself being reckless and hero worshiping everything Marlena does from trying drugs to smoking to drinking and cutting class. Pulled from her fancy prep school and stuck in a small town with her older brother and newly divorced mother, Cat decides that it doesn't matter what she does so she wholly commits herself to Marlena and her scheming. show more Full of drugs, boys, school woes, teen angst, and true friendship, this book was appealing and haunting as you root for Cat and Marlena to grow up and leave that life behind. A wonderful book. show less

When Cat's parents divorce, her mother moves her and her older brother to a small lakeside town in northern Michigan. They're barely scraping by, but they're better off than their new next door neighbors, Marlena, her little brother and her meth-cooking father. Cat is fascinated by Marlena, the cool bad girl, and they quickly become close friends. But Marlena's reckless behavior is self-destructive and even years later Cat, now living in New York with a kind husband and fulfilling job, is still haunted by Marlena.

Julie Buntin's debut novel is the book I had hoped The Girls would be. It's a deep dive into the intense relationships of adolescence, in an environment where the normal adventuresome nature of teenagers has lasting consequences.

Cathy, who is traumatized by her parents' divorce and her father's subsequent estrangement, moves with her mother and brother to a gloomy and economically depressed rural area of Michigan, Silver Lake. She has to leave her private school and stable life for an unfamiliar new school and a life of poverty.

When she meets Marlena, whose severely dysfunctional family lives next door, an intense friendship begins, as it often does with adolescent girls. We are told from the beginning that Marlena will be dead by the end of the year.

The memory of the year that the girls spend together, the only year that Cathy actually spends in Silver Lake, resonates throughout Cathy's life and into her adult years, manifesting in self destructive and self show more sabotaging acts. Marlena's tragic life and death hang over the adult Cathy and pervade her life with a sense of confusion, grief, and guilt.

This is a meditative reflection on memory, regret, and the fact of the tragic circumstances and environments that some people cannot escape. All characters are well drawn, and the sense of place is used effectively.

I loved this book and have been thinking about it since I finished it. It's not really plot driven, so may not appeal to some, but it does pack an emotional punch.

A beautiful eulogy to innocence and Marlena. show less

After her parents' divorce, Cat moves with her brother and mother to a small town in northern Michigan, where she immediately connects with her neighbor, Marlena. Marlena has problems: a dad who cooks meth, a younger neglected brother, an addiction to oxy. And in less than a year, she'll be dead, under suspicious circumstances. Cat will spend years trying to deal with the fact of her death.

This is a coming-of-age story with such a genuine narrative voice and such well-delineated characters that it takes on all the appearance of truth. It didn't take me long to get caught up in Marlena's tragic story, and through Cat's eyes, we receive fresh insights on the nature of family, friendship, addiction, and getting older. By the end, I felt show more real compassion for Cat, damaged as she was--I wanted her to be okay. show less

Marlena is the fateful tale of an intoxicating friendship between two teenage girls. Cat narrates the story while she is in her thirties. She has a good job in New York, a loving boyfriend and a nice home but she is a closet alcoholic. After someone from Cat's past reappears, she is forced to acknowledge her youth and the events that shaped her. Alternating between past and present, Cat reveals the story of her fleeting friendship with the whirlwind known as Marlena and the distressing circumstances of her death.

Cat, her older brother and their mother moved to a small rural town in Northern Michigan after her parent's divorce. Cat isn't thrilled with the move because she doesn't know anyone in town and she can't attend her private show more school anymore. Cat soon becomes enamored by her neighbor, Marlena, who lives in a dilapidated barn with her father and younger brother. Marlena's drug-dealing father is often absent which led to Marlena's self-destructive behavior. Cat, 15, and Marlena, 17, quickly develop an intense friendship and begin to spend every waking minute together. Cat is sheltered and impressionable so Marlena's bad habits begin to rub off on her. The girls spin out of control as their friendship is tainted by drugs, alcohol, addiction and distrust.

It is not difficult to understand why Cat was so infatuated with Marlena. Marlena was a free spirit and spontaneous while still having motherly aspects to her. At 15, Cat is naïve and easily influenced. Deep down, she knows that Marlena is dangerous but I think she wants to feel like she is in control of her life and chooses to ignore those instincts. Marlena has Cat wrapped around her finger. She knows how to manipulate her and make her feel inadequate. I believe their relationship was more one-sided. Cat looked after Marlena and her younger brother and genuinely cared for them while Marlena only seemed to care about herself and getting high. I think Marlena was doomed, with or without Cat in her life. The thing that really set the story apart for me was that it was told from the perspective of Cat as an adult. She was able to look back and re-evaluate her relationship with Marlena, recognizing it for what it really was.

Cat had a difficult relationship with both of her parents which can play a tremendous part in a young person's development. Cat's mother loved and supported her but was an alcoholic. Cat's father was there for her when she was a child but chose to become estranged after the divorce. I believe support from our parents throughout our lives is extremely beneficial but it is most important during our young adult stage. Our teen years are some of the hardest years to live through- our hormones are going haywire, we are trying to find our identities, make friends and feel pressured to succeed in school. I think if Cat and Marlena's parents were more present in their lives, they would've had a very different outcome.

I found some minor flaws with the book. The pace was a bit slow at times and I would have liked to know more about Cat's life in her thirties. Overall, this is an extraordinary debut novel and I am totally impressed. Buntin did an excellent job at capturing the dynamics of a powerful female friendship. I'd be willing to bet this book is somewhat based on an experience of her own. This story was filled with emotion and insight. I'd love to read more by Buntin and I'd highly recommend this book for anyone who enjoys reading about harrowing tales of female adolescent friendship. show less

First of all, this story absorbed me like sponge on water. In other words, I looked forward to picking up the book every day. Second, Marlena reads like non-fiction to me. It resurfaced the question of why we (or some of us? I have trouble imagining that not all of us) are drawn to self-destruction. I felt like the protagonist was like me, like it was living through the same development that I experienced around the age of 20. Yet, the novel pulled in so many details about the life in a tiny tourist town in northern Michigan, and about a meth lab, and about young drug abuse, that I felt as though the author has lived through this story when she was fifteen.

There is the other storyline of an alcoholic thirty-something narrator. I show more appreciated this one, but I wondered if this narrator's perception of her problem with alcohol was inflated. Maybe it was lack of detail, or maybe I just have experience of serial drunks that were way deeper in the sand.

The book, I think (I hope) made me a better person. The narrator talked about her mom in a way that made me consider forgiving mine.

Jonathan Safran Foer's blurb was true to its word - this novel really does have some hilarious sentences that I read to people that were riding the bus with me. They laughed at them, too. One sentence about two geeky girls skipping class only to hide in the bathroom, lest they be discovered, was a particularly good one. show less

This was the April Book Club choice for the Books & Books Key West store. Its generally a rather sad story but it is beautiful, almost poetic in its writing. The author also did an excellent job of conveying "teen angst" without sounding whiny, but rather gritty and real, not like some. The story is of two girls, both from broken families (one more so than the other) who find each other and for one brief explosive year, become each others savior. You know from the beginning of the book (and also the flyleaf) that Marlena dies. The story is told from Cat's perspective as an adult, looking back on this year in her life and how Marlena's life, friendship and subsequent tragic death effected her. There are many questions left unanswered in show more this story, leaving the real conclusions up to the reader. The abuse that Marlena suffers is never detailed, just inferred. How and why Marlena died is never really answered, in the book or in Cat's life, which I believe is largely the impetus for her later issues. Whether or not her telling this story is cathartic for her or not is also one of the conclusions the reader is left to determine. The book was very well written and I will definitely be looking out for other books by her. show less