The winter of adolescence
Brooklyn BookBeat
Julie Buntin’s searing new novel “Marlena” is evocative of that specific suspended time in young womanhood when every decision feels like the most important, and every friendship feels life-long. But also of the stark, suffocating cold of northern Michigan where the book takes place. And where, like in so many rural towns, people are struggling, opiate addiction is rampant, and a feeling of desperation permeates the landscape.
Fifteen-year-old Cat is depressed and lonely when she moves to Silver Lake with her older brother and newly divorced, often drunk, mother. But everything changes when she meets her neighbor, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena. Cat, inexperienced and desperate for connection, is quickly lured into Marlena’s orbit by little more than an arched eyebrow and a shake of white-blond hair. As the two girls turn the untamed landscape of their desolate small town into a kind of playground, Cat catalogues a litany of firsts — first drink, first cigarette, first kiss — while Marlena’s dangerous habits harden and calcify.