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. ( )

First of all, this story absorbed me like sponge on water. In other words, I looked forward to picking up the book every day. Second, Marlena reads like non-fiction to me. It resurfaced the question of why we (or some of us? I have trouble imagining that not all of us) are drawn to self-destruction. I felt like the protagonist was like me, like it was living through the same development that I experienced around the age of 20. Yet, the novel pulled in so many details about the life in a tiny tourist town in northern Michigan, and about a meth lab, and about young drug abuse, that I felt as though the author has lived through this story when she was fifteen.

There is the other storyline of an alcoholic thirty-something narrator. I appreciated this one, but I wondered if this narrator's perception of her problem with alcohol was inflated. Maybe it was lack of detail, or maybe I just have experience of serial drunks that were way deeper in the sand.

The book, I think (I hope) made me a better person. The narrator talked about her mom in a way that made me consider forgiving mine.

Jonathan Safran Foer's blurb was true to its word - this novel really does have some hilarious sentences that I read to people that were riding the bus with me. They laughed at them, too. One sentence about two geeky girls skipping class only to hide in the bathroom, lest they be discovered, was a particularly good one. ( )

This was the April Book Club choice for the Books & Books Key West store. Its generally a rather sad story but it is beautiful, almost poetic in its writing. The author also did an excellent job of conveying "teen angst" without sounding whiny, but rather gritty and real, not like some. The story is of two girls, both from broken families (one more so than the other) who find each other and for one brief explosive year, become each others savior. You know from the beginning of the book (and also the flyleaf) that Marlena dies. The story is told from Cat's perspective as an adult, looking back on this year in her life and how Marlena's life, friendship and subsequent tragic death effected her. There are many questions left unanswered in this story, leaving the real conclusions up to the reader. The abuse that Marlena suffers is never detailed, just inferred. How and why Marlena died is never really answered, in the book or in Cat's life, which I believe is largely the impetus for her later issues. Whether or not her telling this story is cathartic for her or not is also one of the conclusions the reader is left to determine. The book was very well written and I will definitely be looking out for other books by her. ( )

Marlena was absolutely haunting. I grew up with girls like that. I also didn't have the perspective to understand fully what was going on then. This story totally exceeded my expectations. ( )

This slice-of-life, coming-of-age book follows Cat and her memories of Marlena, her wild and troubled neighbor turned best friend. This quiet book follows two teenagers as they explore drugs, love, relationships and each other while teetering towards self-destruction. Marlena dies young, tragically under unclear circumstances that haunt the main character for years. Marlena is a deeply melancholy book about the friendships that can make and unmake us. ( )