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Summary
Summary
A National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize Finalist
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue , BuzzFeed , The Washington Post , Esquire , Harper's Bazaar , NPR , NYLON , Huffington Post, Kirkus Reviews , Barnes & Noble
Chosen for the Book of the Month Club, Nylon Book Club, and Belletrist Book Club
Named an Indie Next Pick and a Barnes and Noble Discover Pick
The story of two girls and the wild year that will cost one her life, and define the other's for decades
Everything about fifteen-year-old Cat's new town in rural Michigan is lonely and off-kilter until she meets her neighbor, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena. Cat is quickly drawn into Marlena's orbit and as she catalogues a litany of firsts--first drink, first cigarette, first kiss, first pill--Marlena's habits harden and calcify. Within the year, Marlena is dead, drowned in six inches of icy water in the woods nearby. Now, decades later, when a ghost from that pivotal year surfaces unexpectedly, Cat must try again to move on, even as the memory of Marlena calls her back.
Told in a haunting dialogue between past and present, Marlena is an unforgettable story of the friendships that shape us beyond reason and the ways it might be possible to pull oneself back from the brink.
Author Notes
Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic , Cosmopolitan , O , The Oprah Magazine , Slate, Electric Literature, and One Teen Story , among other publications. She teaches fiction at Marymount Manhattan College, and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Marlena is her debut novel.
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In her impressive debut novel, Buntin displays a remarkable control of tone and narrative arc. In a keenly observed study of teenage character, narrator Catherine, 15, is miserable in the ramshackle house her newly divorced mother has bought in the dismal town of Silver Lake in northern Michigan. When she meets Marlena, her glamorous 17-year-old next-door neighbor, Cat is smitten with the euphoria of having a best friend. Buntin is particularly sensitive to the misery of adolescent angst, and Cat's growing happiness in Marlena's friendship runs like an electric wire through the narrative. Marlena is dangerous, however: she runs with a bad crowd, and her father cooks meth. From the beginning, we know that Marlena is irresistible, reckless, and brave; she's a mother substitute for her forlorn younger brother-musically talented, beautiful, and doomed to die young. It's only later that Cat understands that Marlena is the needy one in their relationship. Her bravado hides desperation; she fears she'll never get out of Silver Lake, that she has no future, and that "there were kids like us all over rural America." Almost 20 years later, living in New York with her husband and working at a good job, Cat is still damaged by losing Marlena. Crippled by "the pain at the utter core of me," she takes refuge in alcohol and memories. The novel is poignant and unforgettable, a sustained eulogy for Marlena's "glow... that lives in lost things, that sets apart the gone forever." Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* In Buntin's vivid debut, Cat, now a New York City public librarian in her thirties, tells the story of the friendship that changed her forever. Fifteen and stinging from her parents' recent divorce, Cat has already decided that she'll be different in freezing, rugged Silver Lake, Michigan, from the nerdy, do-gooder Cathy she was back in Pontiac. On cue, wild, beautiful, unpredictable Marlena, her new neighbor, appears as Cat, her mother, and brother pull up to the tiny home that's apparently theirs. Cat is suddenly and completely drawn to Marlena: ethereal though chemically fueled, brilliant but reckless, so comforting when she's not angry or, worse, too honest. An early revelation that Marlena will soon die increases the suspense. Cat, an aggressively truant smoker in her new identity, knows that Marlena's dad is up to no good in his rail car deep in the woods, that he's cooking a better version of the meth Marlena's boyfriend makes and sells, and Marlena's constant pill-popping isn't nothing, but this friendship and the life that comes with it are closer to belonging than Cat has ever felt. Though Cat tells her story in flashbacks, Buntin's prose is emotional and immediate, and the interior lives she draws of young women and obsessive best friends are Ferrante-esque.--Bostrom, Annie Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT LAKES, by Dan Egan. (Norton, $17.95.) Climate change, invasive species and growing human populations are all imperiling the largest freshwater system in the world, which is also the source of drinking water for millions. Despite a looming ecological and public health crisis, Egan, a reporter at The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel who has covered the Great Lakes for years, offers measured hope - and a set of solutions. MARLENA, by Julie Buntin. (Picador, $16.) After spending her teenage years in rural northern Michigan, Cat reflects some time later on a luminous young friendship cut short. Marlena ushers Cat into a thrilling adolescent world, and the two forge an easy, intimate bond; a year later, Marlena is dead, and Cat's grief prompts her to re-examine the relationship's lasting consequences. WHAT THE F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves, by Benjamin K. Bergen. (Basic, $16.99.) A delightful investigation of profanity dabbles in language theory and neuroscience. As our reviewer, Josh Lambert, put it: "What seems like a book about language taboos turns out to be a cognitive scientist's sneaky - charming, consistently engrossing - introduction to linguistics." DEFECTORS, by Joseph Kanon. (Washington Square Press, $17.) It's 1961, and Frank, a former C.I.A. operative, has been living in Moscow with his wife for years after defecting from the United States. He's been at work on a memoir, hoping that his brother, Simon, a New York publisher, will print the manuscript. His brother's defection upended Simon's life, and Simon is skeptical of Frank's motives. But the opportunity to understand Frank's reasons for leaving - and learn about life under Soviet rule - proves irresistible. BLITZED: Drugs in the Third Reich, by Norman Ohler. (Mariner, $15.99.) Despite the Nazis' all-out war on drug use, virtually everyone, from housewives to the Führer, was drugged up. A low-dose methamphetamine comparable to crystal meth, Pervitin, became a go-to cure for everything from a flagging sex drive to depression, and fueled many Nazi battlefield campaigns. Ohler's account is full of rich character studies. WHAT IT MEANS WHEN A MAN FALLS FROM THE SKY, by Lesley Nneka Arimah. (Riverhead, $16.) Nigeria's past, present and future converge in these stories, where the relationships between mothers and daughters often play a central role; many stories linger under the specter of war. Our reviewer, Marina Warner, praised the collection, calling Arimah "a witty, oblique and mischievous storyteller."
School Library Journal Review
When Catherine was a teenager, she moved to the small, economically depressed town of Silver Lake, MN, following her mom's divorce. Now in her 30s, Catherine is still haunted by her past. Even a good job and a great husband can't compensate for a pain that won't fade completely and a powerful drinking problem that arose as a result of her best friend's death by drowning. Catherine is consumed by the memory of a girl who made having nothing seem like everything. As chapters deftly alternate between the protagonist's adult life and her adolescence, readers encounter teenage Cat: angry at her dad and unappreciative of her mom's efforts, the 15-year-old is primed for reinvention. A bookish girl on partial scholarship at a private high school, Cat meets Marlena, a force of nature: blonde, sexy, and unapologetically brash and worldly. Cat is soon ditching school to hang out with her friend, who's looked down on by many: Marlena is the daughter of a menacing meth cook who is not above trading his daughter's sexual favors to a drug partner. Drinking, pills, smoking, sex-all the staples of Marlena's life, once glamorous to Cat, become routine as Marlena's sketchy friends and dangerous behavior affect both girls. This searing work from debut author Buntin adroitly captures the dark side of friendship and the turmoil of young adulthood. VERDICT Hand this unflinching tale to savvy teens starting to look beyond Ellen Hopkins or to readers who appreciate gritty fare, such as E.R. Frank's Dime.-Suzanne Gordon, Lanier High School, Gwinnett County, GA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Kirkus Review
Sensitive and smart and arrestingly beautiful, debut novelist Buntin's tale of the friendship between two girls in the woods of Northern Michigan makes coming-of-age stories feel both urgent and new.Fifteen-year-old Cat catches her first glimpse of Marlena as they're unloading the U-Haul; Cat's parents have just gotten divorced, the most obvious consequence of which is that her mother has moved the remainder of the family from the suburbs of Detroit to Silver Lake, a rural town in Northern Michigan, 20 minutes from the nearest grocery store stocking vegetables. It is a meeting both unremarkable and life-changing. "The details of her in my memory are so big and clear they almost can't quite be true," Cat says, looking back. "Her arms were slicked with snowmelt and pimpled from the cold; her hair gave off a burnt-wood smell when she shook it out of her face, the way she often did before she spoke." Over the course of the coming weeks, they become friends, and then best friends, their lives wholly and intensely intertwined. Magnetic and kind and very, very troubled, Marlena introduces the once-studious Cat to a new world of drinking and pills and sex and also friendship, the depth of which neither girl has experienced before. And still, there are parts of Marlena's life Cat cannot reach and doesn't understand: Cat knows someday she'll be leaving Silver Lake; Marlena knows she won't. She's right. With time, Marlena slips further away, swallowed up by drugs and desperation, and by the end of the year she is dead, having drowned alone in a shallow, freezing river in the unforgiving woods. It could so easily be clichd or sentimental. It is neither. Jumping between their teenage friendship in Michigan and Cat's adult life in New York City, Buntin creates a world so subtle and nuanced and alive that it imprints like a memory. Devastating; as unforgettable as it is gorgeous. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
[DEBUT] From the first page of this stunning first novel, as we meet the adult Cat, we know that she has never recovered from her teenage friendship with the daring, desperate, ultimately destructive Marlena. And we know that Marlena is dead, though it takes reading through the nervy narrative to discover how she died and what that has meant for Cat. When she moves to rural Michigan at age 15 with her newly divorced mother and older brother, the naïve, stumbling Cat is immediately drawn to hard-drinking, drug-taking, school-skipping, wrong-side-of-the tracks Marlena. Cat was once a good student who even attended private school, but with Marlena she can't seem to stop herself from spinning out of control: "I saw myself get up.. But a girl, another one, remained safe inside the library. In other words, I saw myself split in two." Every moment of the way, we're screaming at Cat to pull back. And yet we understand Marlena's allure; she promises a bold new life while serving as both lodestar and safe haven. Verdict Buntin perfectly captures a burning and essential friendship with lasting consequences and that terrible moment when we make a wrong turn and can't go back. An exceptional portrait, disturbing and precisely observed; highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, 10/10/16.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
