Fabulous Fiction Firsts #634

Thu, 04/13/2017 - 10:23pm by muffy

In Marlena * *, Julie Buntin's "(s)ensitive and smart and arrestingly beautiful debut" (Kirkus Reviews), 15 year-old Cathy (now calling herself Cat), arrived at Silver Lake, a small rural community in Northern Michigan with her newly divorced mother and older brother, determined to shed her good-girl image and reinvent herself, and was immediately drawn to the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena, her next door neighbor.

Over the course of the coming weeks, the girls turned the untamed landscape of their desolate small town into a kind of playground - skipping school, running feral as Marlena introduced Cat to a new world of drinking and pills and sex and also friendship, the depth of which neither girl has experienced before. Within the year, Marlena was dead, drowned in six inches of icy water in the woods nearby.

Decades later, Cat is married, and a New York City public librarian. She seemingly had move on, now enjoying a close relationship with her mother, until a ghost from that pivotal year surfaces unexpectedly, forcing Cat to examine her role and "the pain at the utter core of me” in losing Marlena.

"The novel is poignant and unforgettable, a sustained eulogy for Marlena’s “glow... that lives in lost things, that sets apart the gone forever.” (Publishers Weekly)

"In this, Marlena joins a glut of recent novels that pair a retrospective female narrator with an extravagantly charismatic but troubled friend. Emma Cline’s novel The Girls loosely reimagines the Manson family murders from the perspective of a 14-year-old named Evie in 1969, who becomes besotted with an older teenager named Suzanne. Emily Bitto’s The Strays is recounted by Lily, a young Australian girl drawn into the 1930s bohemian family of her classmate, Eva. Like Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend, these novels consider the fierce complexity of female friendship, and the particular agony of innocence that yearns to be shed. They examine the allure of danger from a space of safety: It’s inevitable which girl will careen toward catastrophe, and which girl will watch, wistfully, from the sidelines.” Read the full review in The Atlantic.

* * = 2 starred reviews