Marlena
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4.7 • 7 Ratings
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
Tell me what you can't forget,and I'll tell you who you are . . .
Cat is fifteen and the lonely new girl in town. Until she meets her neighbour, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena. Cat is quickly lured into Marlena's roller-coaster orbit by little more than an arched eyebrow and a shake of white-blonde hair. Within one intense, obsessive year of friendship, Marlena is dead, drowned in six inches of icy water in the woods nearby.
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.
Marlena is a riveting, intelligent and brilliant novel from debut author Julie Buntin.
'If you loved The Girls, this is for you . . . totally addictive' Grazia
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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."
