Cat, now a young woman, remembers one difficult year and her friendship with the manic Marlena. With its troubled, reminiscent narrator, this tale goes deep and dark. Divorce, poverty, neglect, alcohol, meth, and the Oxy epidemic all get the “up close and personal” treatment. While the writing is beautiful and rich, the themes make for an emotional journey.
Acclaim (what drew me to this book):
A National Book Critics Circle Leonard Prize Finalist
Longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize
Named a Best Book of the Year by Vogue, BuzzFeed, The Washington Post, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, NPR, NYLON, Huffington Post, Kirkus Reviews, Barnes & Noble
Chosen for the Book of the Month Club, Nylon Book Club, and Belletrist Book Club
Named an Indie Next Pick and a Barnes and Noble Discover Pick
Just a few samples of the gorgeous, insightful writing because I can’t say it any better than the author, Julie Buntin.
On adolescence
“Tell me what you can’t forget, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
“At fifteen, I believed that I would grow up to be the exception to every rule.”
“For a teenage girl, a beautiful mother is a uniquely painful curse.”
“I loved her, as my mom and as a person, for everything, for being the one who stayed.”
On opioids
“Our universe was limited to each other, hemmed in by the perimeters of Silver Lake and the towns around it, where Oxy had already laid down roots, farmed out by doctors treating pain that most everyone seemed to have.”
“There were kids like us all over rural America, I’d find out late; we were basically statistics, Marlena especially, members of a numb army, ranks growing by the day. Alone in our bedrooms, falling asleep in class, meeting in parking lots and the middle of the woods.”
“Now it strikes me as a profoundly American thing—an epidemic that started as an abuse of the cure, a disease we made ourselves.”
“…but I never tried Oxy, not after watching how it scraped at her with its long fingernails, leaving nothing but a body.”
“I’ve never believed in the idea of an innocent bystander. The act of watching changes what happens. Just because you don’t touch anything doesn’t mean you are exempt.”
Like I said, it’s deep and dark, but worth it.
Lorie Smith Schaefer 