In this, Marlena joins a glut of recent novels that pair a retrospective female narrator with an extravagantly charismatic but troubled friend. She drowns, Cat reveals after only a few pages, in “less than six inches of ice-splintered river, in the woods on the outskirts of downtown Kewaunee, a place she had no reason to be at twilight in November.” The rest of the book becomes an attempt by an older Cat to exorcize Marlena’s imprint on her own life-to consider the intoxicating thrill of Marlena’s wildness, and whether Cat could have done more to alter her trajectory. The driver is Marlena, two years older, strikingly beautiful with a “sly, feline face, all cheekbones and blink.” Although she stops the car before it reaches the edge, the metaphor in the scene seals Marlena’s fate. Julie Buntin’s debut novel, Marlena, opens with the narrator, a 15-year-old girl named Cat, hurtling toward Lake Michigan in a car that’s going far too fast.
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