Being the good student, the good daughter, the quiet one, has not saved her from the friction of a shattered family and from the excesses of her slowly degenerating mother. Cat is here with her newly divorced and already alcoholic mother, her brother, and the ghost like memories of an absentee father off living with his young new wife. Cat is the new girl in a bankrupt and dreary Michigan town where the slush of dirty snow and toxin thick rain sloughs the dismal days into one long pointless stream. Told in a haunting dialogue between past and present, Marlena is an unforgettable story of the friendships that shape us beyond reason and the ways it might be possible to pull oneself back from the brink.Somewhere caught between hope and the tantalizing promises of destruction, two broken teenage girls meet and fall into a friendship cast between idolism and subconscious jealousy. Now, decades later, when a ghost from that pivotal year surfaces unexpectedly, Cat must try again to move on, even as the memory of Marlena calls her back. Within the year, Marlena is dead, drowned in six inches of icy water in the woods nearby.
Cat is quickly drawn into Marlena's orbit and as she catalogues a litany of firsts-first drink, first cigarette, first kiss, first pill-Marlena's habits harden and calcify. The story of two girls and the wild year that will cost one her life, and define the other's for decadesĮverything about fifteen-year-old Cat's new town in rural Michigan is lonely and off-kilter until she meets her neighbor, the manic, beautiful, pill-popping Marlena.
Named an Indie Next Pick and a Barnes and Noble Discover Pick Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, BuzzFeed, The Washington Post, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, NPR, NYLON, Huffington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Barnes & NobleĬhosen for the Book of the Month Club, Nylon Book Club, and Belletrist Book Club Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize A National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize Finalist
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