Marlena: A Novel

At its heart, this is a novel about female friendships, love, and loss and it really made me reflect on friendships of mine - ones that lasted, ones that ended - and how really critical impacts were made by those people in my life. Marlena is a story about how one woman is haunted by her friend's life being cut short by tragedy and a reflection on her circumstances and their time together. Great if you desire a little reflection on high school friendships or to feel grateful for your circumstances.

I read a lot of contemporary fiction by women, and Julie Buntin's debut novel "Marlena" is one of my recent (and all-time) favorites. Beautifully written and effective, it captures the competition, complications and heartbreak present in so many intense teenage friendships. This book will stay with you for a long time after you've finished it, and I can't wait to see what Julie Buntin writes next.

I truly enjoyed this story, it has fantastic character development. I really liked how the author bounces the tale back and forth from past to present weaving a very easy to follow story. The main character really also took me back to my younger days of memories with my best friend at 15 yrs old and all of the awkwardness a young adult woman deals with at that age. If you are looking for a story that has some very realistic (and some sad) circumstances to what many young adults go through that is beautifully written, this is a book for you!

In Julie Buntin's Marlena, fifteen year-old Catherine encounters the friend who will change her world forever, the titular Marlena, because she happens to move next door to Marlena's family. A year earlier she'd been known as Cathy, a motivated student at a private high school outside of Detroit, but then her parents divorced and her mother, short on resources, moves her and her brother Jimmy to the northern Lower Peninsula to start over. Catherine decides to become Cat, and her seventeen year-old neighbor becomes her best friend. Marlena is what could be delicately described as a troubled young woman: her mother has long since vanished and her father cooks meth in the woods, she's the closest thing her decade-younger brother has to a parent, she's hooked on opiates and has a squicky relationship with the older man who provides her pills to her. The intense friendship that springs up between the girls draws Cat into a new world: drugs and booze and sex and cutting class. But after a year, Cat tells us, Marlena will be dead, found drowned in a shallow stream in the woods.

The story is told on two tracks: mostly the story of the year in which Marlena was a part of Cat's life, but also Cat all grown up, working at a library in New York City, long past that time in her life. Or is she? The unhealthy relationship she developed as a teenager with alcohol is still with her, threatening to unwind her relationship and career. This is not as successful a framing mechanism as it could be: the portions in Michigan are dominant and the underdevelopment of the portions in New York render them almost superfluous. I think with some editing to balance out the narratives better, the book would have been more powerful. As it is, it's good: the friendship between the girls rings true, and Buntin draws them and the supporting characters in ways that make them complex and interesting, but frustrating because it could have been better. I'd still recommend it, though, especially for those that enjoy stories about strong female friendships and coming-of-age stories.

I loved Marlena. There were so many beautiful lines. I'm even re-reading it a second time now. Just wanted to share the love for this gorgeous novel. This is one that will stay with you for a long time.

Henry Holt and Co. and NetGalley provided me with an electronic copy of Marlena. I was under no obligation to review this book and my opinion is freely given.

Marlena is the story of the corruption of an innocent teen, which has repercussions for her entire life. A sudden move to rural Michigan has left Cat in a vulnerable position, as she is lonely and searching for something. Marlena is two years older, worldly and wise in Cat's opinion, so she latches on with both hands. When the unthinkable happens, will Cat be able to climb out of the hole she has dug? Will Cat ever be able to put the past behind her?

Marlena by Julie Buntin was a little to rough and raw for my taste, with a familiar premise and very little character development. The author went for maximum shock value here, showing the decline of two teenagers and the depressive nature of their environment. Neither main character was all that likable, so I never felt fully invested in the story. Marlena was a missed opportunity for me and not a book that I would feel comfortable recommending to others.

Gorgeous book -- about friendship and the precariousness of adolescence and about class. Set in a part of the country where it is winter most of the year and where people have little. The book doesn't pull punches -- a lot of the material is raw and sad, but the protagonist makes it through in one piece and forges a good life for herself in New York. Bravo Cat.

This novel has some brilliant, extraordinary writing. But it gets in the way of what is a pretty ordinary story. Every once in a while, Buntin really scores a wonderful phrase. And some pages are really stirring. But in a novel, you need to feel for the characters. I was more interested in "Mom" than the kids wasting away - yes, there was a reason they were wasting away in the activities they chose. But the story just accepts that. The other problem with the sterling writing is that it does not match Cat's voice; it sounds like the voice of someone who teaches fiction. Teenage girls' friendship is an important topic, but this wasn't important. In the acknowledgments section, there is evidence that this is based on a true story, but the characterization of Marlena does this person no favors. There's no depth to either character, they just lope along. If this is what passes for prize-winning fiction, someone is getting hornswoggled. I'd be interested in this writer's next book if she can do one.

A gorgeous and heartbreaking story. I woke up early on the day I finished it just so that I could read it before work. Then I sat staring out the window with tears in my eyes. Unparalleled humanity in this book. Julie Buntin is a talent to watch.

Marlena is yet another entry in the coming of age genre involving teen-age angst, as well as the complicated friendship between two girls, during a critical year in our 15 year old narrator’s life. Cat, our narrator, her mother and older brother have moved to rural Michigan after their parents divorce. Cat, taken out of a private school in her sophomore year of high school is both angry and lonely. Plucked down in Silver Lake, the three are just able to make ends meet living “in a small-window grayish box on a street of trailers and A-Frames”. Her older brother Jimmy, defers a scholarship to Michigan State and goes to work in a plastic company. Cat, meets her beautiful, drug dependent neighbor Marlena. Marlena lives in a barn with her negligent, methadone cooking father and younger brother. Marlena is two years older and has already lived a lifetime. In the first chapter, we are told that Marlena will be dead by the end of the year.

The book alternates between 15 year old Cat living in Michigan and the women she becomes, now 35 years old, married and living in NYC. The prose is sound and moving as it articulates what it feels like to live with survivor’s guilt. The 35 year old Cat is still full of emotion and regrets, was she and her brother the impetus that irrefutably led to Marlena’s death? Could she have changed anything that happened that fateful year? The bleak spirit of the book permeates from start to finish as our narrator never appears to be able to free herself from either Marlena’s spell or her own demons. In some ways a rather limited all too familiar tale, that was not quite able to distinguish itself from the crowded group of similar books.

I came very close to putting this books aside after the first couple of chapters. It has a weak beginning. It read like a YA novel, a story about teenagers full of angst. But for some reason, I continued on and it got better and better. Darker. More complex. The characters were fully realized and I started to root for all of them, wanting them to succeed and escape the poverty and drugs and boredom that defined their lives. A very well written story of friendship and loss, it had me crying at the end, feeling Cat's grief and her will to overcome her own demons. Bravo, hope to see more from this writer.

The story of an unlikely friendship between two adolescent girls, the memory of which continues to haunt the survivor of the pair well into adulthood. It is set in northern lower Michigan, in an area populated in the summer by affluent cottagers, and year round by impoverished, un- or underemployed folks, many of whom get through the days with food stamps and massive infusions of drugs and alcohol. The backwoods hide many a methamphetamine cook site, and meth abuse is commonplace, along with the attendant destruction of families and dereliction of parental duties. I live in an area of Michigan much like that depicted in this novel, and I applaud its authenticity and depiction of the struggles many face in these parts.

The winters are long and snowy and can be quite bleak. This book captures the hopelessness that many experience here, especially during the long cold months. (It even features a snow fall on the day that school gets out for the "summer" in June which reminded me of the year that there was still ice in our Lake Superior harbor on Memorial Day).

I found the friendship between the two main characters to be credible and at the same time unusual. The narrator herself was surprised at how drawn to Marlena she was, given their different life experiences, socio-economic backgrounds, and ages. And the friendship helped to unearth some qualities in the narrator previously hidden. One learns at the outset that Marlena does not survive her 17th year, and yet she is drawn in such a way to make the reader, like the narrator, wonder what would have happened had Marlena lived a longer life. I think many people have had an intense friendship in their youth that continues to radiate into the present; this is the story of one of those.

My only small criticism of the book was that the author was writing, seemingly in the present, of things that happened some 15-20 years ago, yet the characters had access to computers and texted each other all the time when teenagers. This seemed like something of an anachronism to me, as I didn't think that smart phones and texting were as ubiquitous in the time period of the novel as they are depicted to be. Don't let this small matter deter you from reading this novel, however; maybe my memory is wrong.

This is a story that has stayed with me after the final page. I cannot say the same for many modern novels, so I recommend this work to all.