WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW
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| “When you grow up, who you were as a teenage either takes on a mythical importance or it's completely laughable. I wanted to be the kind of person who wiped those years away; instead, I feared, they defined me.”- Marlena by Julie Buntin |
An electric debut novel about love, addiction, and loss; the story of two girls and the feral 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, inexperienced and desperate for connection, is quickly lured into Marlena’s orbit by little more than an arched eyebrow and a shake of white-blond hair. As the two girls turn the untamed landscape of their desolate small town into a kind of playground, Cat catalogues a litany of firsts—first drink, first cigarette, first kiss—while 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 to forgive herself and move on, even as the memory of Marlena keeps her tangled in the past.
Alive with an urgent, unshakable tenderness, Julie Buntin’s Marlena is an unforgettable look at the people who shape us beyond reason and the ways it might be possible to pull oneself back from the brink.
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, inexperienced and desperate for connection, is quickly lured into Marlena’s orbit by little more than an arched eyebrow and a shake of white-blond hair. As the two girls turn the untamed landscape of their desolate small town into a kind of playground, Cat catalogues a litany of firsts—first drink, first cigarette, first kiss—while 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 to forgive herself and move on, even as the memory of Marlena keeps her tangled in the past.
Alive with an urgent, unshakable tenderness, Julie Buntin’s Marlena is an unforgettable look at the people who shape us beyond reason and the ways it might be possible to pull oneself back from the brink.
In my review for The Burning Girl, I mentioned by general disinterest in stories about intense female friendships, mostly because there is rarely anything new or insightful said about it. And yet I still read Marlena because, well, I don't know, it seemed to have more teeth than the aforementioned The Burning Girl, given that it is about a poverty-stricken area in upstate Michigan, and deals with issues like meth addiction.
Our main character, Cat, moves to upstate Michigan with her mother and brother after her parents divorce because, of course, her father has an affair with a much younger women. Sometimes I wonder if authors have heard of this thing called "no-fault divorce" because it seems like every broken home is because of the father having an affair. I don't think I've ever read a book where two people get divorced, but it's okay because they both love their children and want to share custody. Believe it or not, that happens, too.
Anyway, she then meets Marlena, a beautiful girl with a meth-addicted father, meth-dealing boyfriend, and much younger brother to take care of. The younger brother is technically the catalyst for Cat to start reminiscing about Marlena again after 15 or so years, but in the actual book he's really nothing more than a morality pet, which I disliked. There was enough meat to the story without his story line.
I also didn't really like the framing device, and the alternating points of view between Michigan and New York, the past and the present. I liked that it was from the point of view of an adult thinking back on her past, like History of Wolves, but at the same time I really did not give one iota of a damn about Cat's life in New York. It dragged down the story, and I would have preferred it if Buntin did what Fridlund did and made it apparent that this is Cat thinking back on her past, but not mention what she was up to in the present.
As a whole, though, I could not get into this book. I think this must be the most boring book about drug addicts ever because I have not encountered a book that has refused to stick with me as much as this book did in a long long time. Even though I finished it, I was really only half paying attention to it the whole time reading. Which annoyed me, because the story and the writing were better than they were in The Burning Girl, and yet that book stuck with me more.
Perhaps that was because of my dislike of the main character. I causally disliked her, mostly because she seemed to be on her high horse as to what books she reads. Like when she causally brought up Jane Eyre but didn't actually name Jane Eyre, and seemed to assume that no one else had ever heard of that widely read, famous classic novel. Or that she brings up A Clockwork Orange once and Marlena makes some remark about how no one had ever heard of that book, when even if you hadn't known it was a book, you've probably heard of the movie. And, frankly, a movie like that would have been right up that crowd's alley. So maybe it wasn't more so my dislike of Cat as it was the author's portrayal of Cat by using other characters, if that makes any sense at all.
So that's basically all I have to say about Marlena. I suppose that people who love to read books about intense, even romantic friendships between teenage girls will love this book, but to me, it's just another entry to an already bloated contemporary subgenre.
6 out of 10
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