Marlena (Buntin)

Marlena 
Julie Buntin, 2017
Henry Holt & Co.
288 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781627797641


Summary
The story of two girls and the wild year that will cost one her life, and define the other’s for decades 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 is quickly drawn into Marlena’s orbit and as she catalogues a litany of firsts—first drink, first cigarette, first kiss, first pill—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 again to move on, even as the memory of Marlena calls her back.

Told in a haunting dialogue between past and present, Marlena is an unforgettable story of the friendships that shape us beyond reason and the ways it might be possible to pull oneself back from the brink. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—1987
• Where—Petoskey, Michigan
• Education—B.A., New School University; M.F.A., New York University
• Currently—lives in Brooklyn, New York City


Julie Buntin is from northern Michigan. Her work has appeared in the Atlantic, Cosmopolitan, Oprah Magazine, Slate, Electric Literature, and One Teen Story, among other publications. She teaches fiction writing at Marymount Manhattan College, and is the director of writing programs at Catapult. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. (From the publisher.)

Book Reviews
Marlena, the fated heroine of Julie Buntin's debut novel is a force of nature, near mythical in her beauty, her lust for danger, and her intensity. She's a dazzling creation—so much so that, as a reader, it's hard not to fall under her spell. READ MORE…
Molly Lundquist - LitLovers


Watchful, bookish Cat and reckless, alluring Marlena have plenty of literary and pop cultural antecedents, but Buntin, through closely observed detail, makes these two her own.… This generous, sensitive novel of true feeling is at its most moving when it sweeps you up without too much explication, becoming both a painful exorcism and a devoted memorial to friends and selves who are gone.
Deborah Shapiro - New York Times Book Review


A vivid portrait of a friendship between two teen girls in a troubled community that captures the heartaches of adolescence.… At every turn, Buntin’s prose flows with the easy, confident rhythms of an accomplished writer, and though there’s really no mystery in the narrative, it reads nearly as compulsively as a thriller.… The tale of two friends, one who succeeds and one who fails, isn’t new ? it’s the entire focus of Elena Ferrante’s wildly popular Neapolitan books. But it remains fascinating nonetheless, especially in Buntin’s capable hands.
Boston Globe


We’ve heard a lot recently about how writers need to pay more attention to Trump Country. Though Marlena isn’t explicitly political, Buntin, herself raised in northern Michigan, is a sensitive observer of such territory, where jobs are hard to come by but drugs and alcohol aren’t…. Balanced against this class-attentive realism, though, is something very different: a wild, gorgeous evocation of the wildness gorgeousness of youth. At the center of the novel looms the dangerously charismatic and dangerously out-of-control Marlena.
San Francisco Chronicle


Julie Buntin’s standout debut novel, Marlena… cannily interweaves two different time frames to capture an electric friendship and its legacy.… Buntin is attuned to the way in which adolescent friends embolden and betray.… Cat is a keen observer of all the markers of upward mobility: in this case, a New York life complete with a literary job and a kind, stable husband who makes dinner. The novel’s most impressive passages concern the watermark that remains, visible in the light of too many after-work martinis, and in attempts at adult friendships.
Vogue


It's still so early in 2017 that calling something a best debut novel of the year is a dicey thing to try and do. But if the Lorrie Moore blurb on the front cover doesn't tip you off that Julie Buntin's Marlena is a book you should be paying attention to, the fact that the author created something that could easily be called the millennial Midwestern version of the celebrated Elena Ferrante Neapolitan Novels crossed with Robin Wasserman's great Girls on Fire, should do the trick.
Rolling Stone


In this icy and accomplished first novel, the intoxicating friendship between an inexperienced loner and her manic, wild-child neighbor continues to exert an irresistible pull on our narrator decades later.
Oprah Magazine


Marlena is a gorgeous portrayal of what it’s like to be a teenage girl, and an even more gorgeous exploration of the events that transform the woman a teenage girl grows into.
Newsweek


(Starred review.) In her impressive debut novel, Buntin displays a remarkable control of tone and narrative arc.… The novel is poignant and unforgettable, a sustained eulogy for Marlena.…
Publishers Weekly

When she moves to a new town in rural Michigan, 15-year-old Cat is lonely until she meets wild-hare sophisticate Marlena. Soon she's telling Marlena all about her first kiss and her first drink, while Marlena's risky behavior gets riskier. A high-profile debut.
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [A] vivid debut.… Buntin’s prose is emotional and immediate, and the interior lives she draws of young women and obsessive best friends are Ferrante-esque.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Sensitive and smart and arrestingly beautiful…coming-of-age stories [that] feel both urgent and new.… Buntin creates a world so subtle and nuanced and alive that it imprints like a memory. Devastating; as unforgettable as it is gorgeous.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, use these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Marlena…then take off on your own:

1. Talk about Silver Lake—its poverty, the boredom the area instills in teenagers, its isolation. In what way might its environment contribute to the abuse of drugs and alcohol?

2. How would you describe Cat? In what way is she different from — as well as similar to — Marlena? Consider her relationship to her mother.

3. What about Marlena? How would you describe her character: reckless, adventurous …what else? Talk about Marlena's life with her addict father and her meth-cook of a boyfriend. Was Marlena's addiction inevitable? Then there's Bolt—what's going on there?

4. Although financially Cat's family is in tough straits, Marlena's is in "full-blown" poverty. Yet Cat doesn't pity Marlena. Why not? Does Marlena pity herself? Do you?

5. What is the nature of Cat and Marlena's relationship? How would you describe it? What draws the two girls together? Is the relationship one of equality? In what way does Cat seem both charmed and terrified by Marlena?

6. (Follow-up to Question 5) What does Cat mean when she observes, "If I gave Marlena up, I’d be leaving something important with her forever, something of mine that I’d never get back”?

7. We know early on that Marlena dies. What impact does that foreknowledge have on your reading?

8. Had Marlena not died, would she have made it out as Cat did? Or might she have been unable to free herself from the grip of poverty and addiction? What would you have predicted? What enabled Cat to get out?

9. What lasting effects does Marlena and her death have on Cat—both in the immediate aftermath and years later?

10. The novel's section that has Cat living and working in New York allows the author to observe the social scene with precision. How does she portray that urbane world—and Cat's life in it?

11. Are you satisfied with the final revelation surrounding Marlena's death? Why or why not?

12. Which of the book's two sections did you find more engaging? Were you drawn more to the New York or the Michigan setting?

13. Have you ever had the kind of friendship that Cat and Marlena had? Have you ever had a friend like Marlena?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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