Her older brother walked away from a college scholarship to help take care of his mom. Cat's mom has a drinking problem and with no job skills is lucky to get a job cleaning a summer estate.Ĭatherine had been on scholarship at a private school, a good student, college-bound, a bookish loner. It is also down the road from the mansions along Lake Michigan where the 1% come to play, and a historic, elite Methodist enclave. Silver Lake is a half hour away from the school and Walmart and the nearest mall is ninety miles downstate. Cat, fifteen, wants to be like Marlena-cool, daring, exciting, experienced.Īfter her dad left them, Cat's mom moved the family from Pontiac to her childhood vacation spot, Silver Lake. She develops a girl crush on a charismatic and beautiful older teen who lives next door. Cat tells the story of being the new girl in a small Up North town, looking for a new best friend. The narrator, Cat, is living in New York City with a good job and a loving husband. But back where? from Marlena by Julie Buntin I want to go home, I want to go home, but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place, it's a feeling. I want to go home-a phrase that's stuck on a loop, that I hear before falling asleep, waiting in line for my coffee, tapping at the elevator button and rising through the sky to my apartment, worrying the words like a lucky stone, and yet my desire is not attached to a particular places-not to Silver Lake, not to Marlena, not to Mom or Dad or Jimmy. The painful nostalgia for a moment in time, the haunting loss of a loved one, how in youth our naivety blinds us to darker realities. The novel focuses on Marlena, a teenage girl in Northern Michigan caught in a web of poverty and drugs, and the lasting impact Marlena had on the narrator, Cat.īuntin's novel caught so many things for me. from Marlena by Julie BuntinĪfter reading Ohioby Stephen Markley and Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo Campbell, books about Midwest small towns, drugs, abuse, and growing up, I decided it was the right time to read Julie Buntin's Marlena. I wanted to be the kind of person who wipes those years way instead, I feared, they defined me. When you grow up, who you were as a teenager either takes on a mythical importance or its completely laughable.
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