![]() ![]() A disease, responsible for suicides, the appearance of ghosts, the arrival of disembodied voices. Nostalgia is no longer considered a sickness, not technically, but it was once-the seventeenth-century Swiss physician Johannes Hofer gave the affliction its name, from the Greek words nostos (home, or even, return home) and algos (pain). Now, decades later, when a ghost from that pivotal year surfaces unexpectedly, Cat must try to forgive herself and move on, even as the memory of Marlena keeps her tangled in the past.Īlive with an urgent, unshakable tenderness, Julie Buntin’s Marlena is an unforgettable look at the people who shape us beyond reason and the ways it might be possible to pull oneself back from the brink. Within the year, Marlena is dead, drowned in six inches of icy water in the woods nearby. As the two girls turn the untamed landscape of their desolate small town into a kind of playground, Cat catalogues a litany of firsts-first drink, first cigarette, first kiss-while Marlena’s habits harden and calcify. ![]() ![]() Cat, inexperienced and desperate for connection, is quickly lured into Marlena’s orbit by little more than an arched eyebrow and a shake of white-blond hair. Everything 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. ![]()
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