...a thrilling and important examination of female adolescent friendship ... Marlena feels timeless, its vivid characters suspended in the difficult moment of awakening just before adulthood. It is a gem of a book, brief and urgent, nearly perfect in its execution ... We know from the start that Marlena will die. Buntin tells us this on the fourth page of her novel. This early revelation is a daring authorial move that, in lesser hands, would knock the tension out of the narrative. But when Marlena finally meets her end, it feels neither inevitable or muted: Instead, the loss of this young, bright life strikes readers as both surprising and tragic ... as Buntin heartbreakingly illustrates in the elegiac Marlena, there is a firm line that exists between children who are loved and cared for — even by a parent who makes mistakes — and children who are not.
Julie Buntin’s standout debut novel cannily interweaves two different time frames to capture an electric friendship and its legacy ... Like Ferrante and Smith, Buntin is attuned to the way in which adolescent friends embolden and betray ... 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.
'We were basically statistics,' Cat tells us, but one of Buntin’s achievements is in acknowledging that reality while constructing characters that are anything but ... There’s a risk in writing straightforward, first-person prose about muted passivity, namely that such prose can begin to exemplify it, especially next to the more beautifully descriptive sentences here. And a few moments might have been more powerful with a little less of Cat’s somewhat redundant commentary on the nature of memory, time and loss. 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.
Beyond the exhilarating and terrifying evolution of the girls’ friendship, Buntin excels at capturing the sensations of girlhood ... 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 ... Marlena’s vivid portrait of a friendship between two teenage girls in a troubled community ? one who made out, and one who didn’t ? viscerally captures the sensations and heartaches of adolescence.
Buntin’s story will remind you of your childhood, your first time sneaking out, the first time you realized drugs were around, the first time you noticed someone looking at you lustfully. But the novel is also a love letter to understanding motherhood and your own mother. It’s infused with a longing to get back the time you wasted being embarrassed by your parents. And that is how Buntin has cemented her first novel: steeped in nostalgia, as a crush-worthy visit to a childhood that is so very unhealthy and so very romantic in many ways.
Julie Buntin’s excellent first novel, Marlena, emerges from two very different novelistic traditions. On the one hand, Buntin’s careful attention to place (wild, beautiful, meth-riven northern Michigan) and class (the working vs. the non-working poor) marks her as a realist in the David Means or Stuart Dybek mode ... Balanced against this class-attentive realism, though, is something very different: a wild, gorgeous evocation of the wildness gorgeousness of youth ... longing makes itself felt in the novel’s many lyrical passages, an intense shimmering that recalls Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping. If Marlena has one foot in the world of Midwestern realism, then it has another in the world of visionary fiction.
...[a] riveting, assured debut ... This is not a novel of answered questions or clear-cut resolutions—like Cat, Buntin focuses on the way memory obscures and warps, and how the act of storytelling itself may be the closest thing we have to the truth ... Despite their immaturity and messy choices, both girls are deeply endearing; Buntin excels at capturing the longing and intensity of being a teenager ... Because of its confessional, self-referential tone, Marlena is engrossing in the way the very best literary memoirs are.It’s magical to see someone making sense out of the chaos of their history through carefully chosen words, to see a person so compelled by these events they can’t help but craft their experience into a story. But it’s a trick: like Marlena’s pin full of pills, Buntin’s masterful technique is hidden in plain sight; Cat’s voice is so precise and convincing it’s easy to forget that she too is an invention.
The telling is so intimate that one can miss, at first, that Marlena is addicted to the pills she carries around inside a pin on her chest ... There is a moment when Marlena drops her pin and the pills scatter all over the floor; Cat’s description of the desperation with which Marlena scrambles across the floor to gather them is gut-wrenching. The book is ostensibly about friendship and the indelible mark the troubled Marlena left on Cat, but it is also a quiet, powerful look at addiction.
...[a] vivid debut ... Though Cat tells her story in flashbacks, Buntin’s prose is emotional and immediate, and the interior lives she draws of young women and obsessive best friends are Ferrante-esque.
The novel’s opening line serves as a kind of thesis, a sentence crafted as much for its poetry as for its meaning. 'Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are,' Buntin writes, giving her protagonist a voice that sounds at once meditative but also slightly uneased ... That divide, echoing the first line of the novel, continually makes Marlena such a fascinating exploration into how one’s life evolves from traumatic beginnings. As a narrator, Cat continually reveals herself to be an intriguing study in how one overcomes — and remains tied — to the past, and as a novel, Marlena demonstrates an author’s deft ability to capture such a condition.
Sensitive and smart and arrestingly beautiful, debut novelist Buntin’s tale of the friendship between two girls in the woods of Northern Michigan makes coming-of-age stories feel both urgent and new ... Jumping between their teenage friendship in Michigan and Cat’s adult life in New York City, Buntin creates a world so subtle and nuanced and alive that it imprints like a memory. Devastating; as unforgettable as it is gorgeous.
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’s 'glow...that lives in lost things, that sets apart the gone forever.'”
