This was an exceptional book about people's effect on our lives and told a damn good story. My first book from this author and I cannot wait for more. Excellent characters, pacing, and dialogue too. 5 stars!

A coming of age story where divorce, bad influences, and survival all conspire for the perfect train wreck. You won't be able to look away.

Marlena by Julie Buntin is simply amazing. We have all read coming-of-age stories similar to this one: a teen moves to a new town, befriends the mysterious cool girl who lives next door, becomes obsessed with her and her life, and ultimately becomes both an anchor to her childhood, and an unknowable legacy, to the teen as she grows older. But there is something special about the way Julie Buntin tells this story. Her writing is flawless and flows freely. The characters are real and you worry about them when you put the book down. The ending left me with shivers.

Marlena, the title character of the book, is the cool girl Cat befriends when she moves to a poor suburb in northern Michigan. But as the story unravels, we see how “cool” and “troubled” can so easily get switched. Even though Marlena is only a few years older than Cat, her drug use, sexuality, and messed up family life lends Cat to idolize her as if she was an adult to look up to. As Cat slowly learns this is not the case, and tragedy befalls the two friends, Buntin takes the reader on a heartbreaking journey of self-discovery through the rest of Cat’s life.

The novel is released on April 4th, and I highly recommend it for those who love really well-written stories about growing up, teenagers, and how the past can still dictate our present.

I wanted this book to be better than it was. The narrator was flawed in an intriguing way, uninterested in her own rehabilitiation and redemption, and obsessed with her childhood friend Marlena in a fascinating way. But knowing from nearly the first page that Marlena will die less than a year after they meet does not enhance the plot but instead reveals the inconsistent pacing--far too much time seems spent some of the flashback details, while the narrator's current life is static and flat.

Cat is only 15 when her family moves to Michigan, and it’s here that she meets Marlena, her wild, tempestuous neighbor. Looking for a friend, a connection of any kind, Cat gets sucked into Marlena’s orbit. Together, the two run wild through town, and Cat grows up, very quickly. But the party’s over less than a year after it began, ending with Marlena’s death. Years later, Cat has managed to build a life for herself when memories of that lost year rise up and threaten to swallow her whole. This is a story about childhood friendships, the days when you believed you could do anything, be anything, a coming of age story that haunted me