It is made obvious from the outset by both commonly understood narratives and the layered subtext of the prose that Cat and Marlena’s intense, delirious relationship is doomed to end in great tragedy, but this doesn’t seem to hinder the novel any. Cue the timely discovery of the wild, passionate girl-next-door – the vivacious and rebellious Marlena, who lives in a barn with her little brother and crystal meth cooking father. Cat lives in near poverty in a little town on the edge of lake Michigan with her broken family that consists of a distant older brother and a mother lost without the presence of her father. Cat is a quiet, bookish girl with a surprising fire in her belly and a generous heaping of dormant, uninspired creativity in her mind. Fresh with clearly remembered and intimately experienced details of the struggle and turbulence of adolescent life, Buntin pours herself into narrator Cathy, caught in a rut of reminiscing and fantasising on the life of her 15-year-old self, back when she had reinvented herself as Cat. Marlena is the stunning, intricately thought out début by young New Yorker Julie Buntin.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |