Marlena

Marlena is the story of an adult woman looking back at her teenage friendship with a neighbor girl two years older than her. Although the friendship lasted less than a year, it was formational for her in ways that she doesn't fully understand. As the story moves between the woman's present life and her memories of Marlena, she acknowledges the grip of the past and begins to see the possibility of a future.

It's not as therapeutic as it sounds. The teenagers have broken families, they are reckless with themselves and others, and they cause permanent harm. The question at the end is whether the girl who's left will be able to move forward.

The danger I felt with this book is that it could so easily lapse into cautionary-tale-about-wild-girls-becoming-adult-druggies, OR wild-teenager-finds-redemption. However, many details kept it from lapsing into cliche and allowed it to be its own story. I appreciated the main character's mother, especially, who is a bit distracted by her own troubles, but is an admirable person.

I read this for the Morning News Summer Reading Challenge. I wouldn't have picked this book for myself, but I'm glad I read it.

Kind of meandering and pointless. I love a book about teenage obsession but this just felt sad and half-formed. Lots of parental neglect, missing the obvious, and a main character who doesn't really grow up.

Closer to 4.5 for me.

This one was a slow burn, the desperation of the setting and the lifestyle seeping in slowly until I felt fully immersed in the sadness of this story.
It's heartbreaking and raw and honest and hits on notes that are often hard to put into words. The writing is really impeccable.

The only qualm I had with this book was that I often spent time while reading trying to guess what year it was. In the ‘present' part of the book, Cat is in her 30s (making her roughly 5-8 years older than me) but in the past she was 15. If we consider the book to be set in present time at publishing (2017) then that would make the past roughly around 2000... which can't be right considering how the kids all have cell phones and text each other. Maybe it's obvious to others that the forward date is beyond 2017, but I found myself constantly doing math to try to figure out what years the book was set in. Maybe it's because I would have likely been a teen in the same timeframe, so my memory wanted to search for common denominators. A lot of the music and fashion references do not quite line up for me either- I feel like the book probably is aiming to be set in the late 2000s, but it felt incosistent. Despite this, I still really loved it and it still affected me deeply. I'll be thinking about Cat & Marlena for awhile.