![]() Cat needs more and more and more, but who is this Marlena, anyway?īuntin’s skill is that she ‘gets’ screwed up teen girls. MARLENA pulls Cat into a litany of firsts: first drink, first kiss, first cigarette, first pill. Marlena globs on to Cat, or perhaps it’s the other way around, but needless to say, the girls become inseparable. Her father is pretty much a deadbeat and her mother, dead. Two years older than Cat and riddled with her own insecurities and issues (pill-popping, alcohol, among others). Cat misses her old life where she attended a fancy prep school. ![]() ![]() ![]() Told from a single POV-Cat’s-and Marlena’s bestfriend and in alternating time periods, places (New York present-day and Silver Lake, Michigan about fifteen years earlier), it’s a rare glimpse into deep interiority, of growth and grief.Ĭat and her mother and brother have relocated to northern Michigan after her parents divorce. It’s like peeking inside a 16-year old’s journal and reading all of her dark, intimate thoughts, some that are sharply perceptive, and others that are the general wanderings of someone who doesn’t quite know where she’s going. This is where Julie Buntin’s writing excels in fact, some may be entirely foiled into believing MARLENA is a memoir it is not. MARLENA is one of those rare gems that feels like the entire dome of humidity that is summer is suffocating you. ![]() A story of two girls–both teenagers–in northern Michigan fighting for their freedom, their passions, and utlimately–their lives. ![]()
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