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Between Here and April
by Deborah Copaken Kogan
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Staff Pick
"The highest praise I can give Between Here and April is that I had to put it down several times in order to take a deep breath and savor what I had just read. Rarely has a book made me think as deeply, weep as openly, and recommend as heartily as I will Kogan's debut novel."
Recommended by Danielle, Powells.com
"The highest praise I can give Between Here and April is that I had to put it down several times in order to take a deep breath and savor what I had just read. Rarely has a book made me think as deeply, weep as openly, and recommend as heartily as I will Kogan's debut novel."
Recommended by Danielle, Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews When a deep-rooted memory suddenly surfaces, Elizabeth Burns becomes obsessed with the long-ago disappearance of her childhood friend April Cassidy. Driven to investigate, Elizabeth discovers a thirty-five-year-old newspaper article revealing the details that had been hidden from her as a child: April's mother, Adele, drove with her two young daughters deep into the woods where she killed first them and then herself.
Elizabeth, now a mother herself, tracks down everyone — Adele Cassidy's neighbor, her psychiatrist, her sister — who might give her the insight necessary to understand how a mother could commit such a monstrous crime.
Elizabeth's investigation leads her back to herself: her compromised marriage, her demanding children, her increasing self-doubt, her desire for more out of her own life, and finally to a fearsome reckoning with what it means to be a mother and wife. Review: What could be better than working as a daredevil photojournalist, jetting around the world's hotspots and sleeping with alluring strangers? Motherhood, of course. Forget fame, danger and sex: Nothing compares with the thrill of tucking little ones into bed after supper. Or so Deborah Copaken Kogan told us in "Shutterbabe," her wild 2001 memoir of capturing war photos ... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) and male booty. Fresh out of Harvard, this Potomac, Md., native ventured into Afghanistan, Bucharest and the Soviet Union during some of the most alarming crises of recent history. But then she found the man of her dreams and settled down in Manhattan to raise a family. Well, the seven-year itch is an equal opportunity employer. Kogan's first novel, "Between Here and April," is an amalgamation of autobiography, true crime and melodrama. Her heroine is a wife and mother named Elizabeth, a former globetrotting journalist from Potomac, Md., who found the man of her dreams and settled down in Manhattan to raise a family. Trouble is, the glow of domestic paradise has faded. Making cupcakes for the grade school has lost its thrill, and arguing about housework during sex is a turn-off. At 41, married to a workaholic, Elizabeth feels as though she's "playing house all alone," and it's an exhausting, dispiriting routine, more than enough to make a prematurely retired international journalist pine for war in the mountains of Afghanistan. With "Between Here and April," Kogan confronts in the most dramatic terms imaginable the feminist issues that seemed too cutely brushed aside in her memoir. She has a good ear for the basic patterns — including the cliches — of married life among the professional class. Mothers everywhere will relate to Elizabeth's efforts to keep her once exciting career alive with a hodgepodge of freelance jobs that are neither satisfying nor lucrative: "writing press releases about antifungal medications and a new brand of sneakers for a viral marketing firm, comparing the suction strength of various breast pumps for an online parenting site." When the story opens, Elizabeth and her husband are on a date at the theater, a rare chance to get out of their apartment and away from the kids. "Medea" seems like a poor choice for this — or any — romantic rendezvous, but as a model of bad parenting Euripides' tragedy is pretty clear, and it also gives a fair indication of this novel's heavy-handedness. No one can endure that play without flinching, but it has an even more powerful effect on Elizabeth: During the climatic scene when Medea begins slaughtering her two little boys, Elizabeth suddenly recalls a brief friendship, 35 years earlier, with April Cassidy in the first grade. She begins to panic, stands up from her seat and faints in the aisle. The bulk of the novel is spent trying to understand why she reacted so dramatically to "Medea" and the memory it triggered. With her therapist's encouragement, Elizabeth begins researching what happened to April, the girl she knew for only two months in 1972. She finds a story in The Washington Post that describes a woman who murdered her two children — April and her sister — and then committed suicide. This part of the novel is apparently based on fact. In a note provided by her publisher, Kogan writes, "I would like to protect, if possible, the surviving father from unwanted inquiries, which is why I wound up writing this as a novel, not as nonfiction." Kogan's heroine, however, has no such qualms about protecting anyone's privacy. Elizabeth hopes to restart her career by making a documentary about this tragedy, a project that inspires many more questions, "all the while circling back to the most obvious, least answerable, and most terrifying question of all: How could a mother kill her children?" Elizabeth interviews people in Montgomery County who were connected with the doomed family, and she finds transcripts of the mother's psychiatric sessions during the weeks leading up to the murders. Her research seems ridiculously easy — everybody remembers in colorful detail the events of 35 years ago or left helpful records — but the story is so engaging that I just shrugged and raced along. That's also a credit to this narrator's wonderfully appealing voice: funny, frustrated, likable, totally candid about her desires and failings. The novel's rising suspense stems from the way Elizabeth's investigation gradually takes over her life. As she looks deeper into the horrific death of her first-grade friend, her attention turns to April's mother with surprising sympathy. "I wanted," she says, "to understand her: to crawl under her flesh, to feel her heart beating in my chest, to see a world turned hopeless and dim through her own eyes." That desire drives her research, and Elizabeth begins to identify with this accursed mother in the most alarming ways. Although the eventual crisis approaches "Medea" proportions, without Euripides' grand characters, the novel slides toward bathos. It's awfully exciting, but I wish that Kogan had exercised a little more subtlety. Her narration falls into such a clear schematic pattern, highlighting its feminist points like the syllabus in a women's studies seminar: post-partum depression, medical gender bias, rape, surrogate caregivers, domestic inequality, pornography, etc. Maybe that makes "Between Here and April" the perfect book club book, but I suspect that readers — working mothers especially — will find these complex issues are resolved here too neatly and sweetly. Ron Charles is a senior editor of The Washington Post Book World. He can be reached at charlesr(at symbol)washpost.com. Reviewed by Ron Charles, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)Review: "Although the novel's characters hold our interest, Kogan's fiction lacks the fire of her racy memoir, Shutterbabe....She seems more at home writing about real-life international matters than life on the domestic front." Booklist Review: "Heartfelt, painful, and almost hypnotically readable." Adam Gopnik, author of Paris to the Moon Review: "A haunting work of ambition and dimension....This is a big, rich novel that tackles the ambivalence of motherhood full-frontally." Meg Wolitzer, author of The Ten-Year Nap About the Author Deborah Copaken Kogan's first book, Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War, was a Barnes & Noble Discover selection, was serialized in Talk magazine, and was optioned for film. Her writing and photographs have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine, Time, Newsweek, Self, Harper's Bazaar, Elle, Paris Match, Stern, and der Spiegel. She was an Emmy Award-winning television producer at ABC and for Dateline NBC.
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781565125629
- Author:
- Copaken Kogan, Deborah
- Publisher:
- Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
- Author:
- Kogan, Deborah Copaken
- Subject:
- Literary
- Subject:
- Missing persons
- Subject:
- Motherhood
- Subject:
- Missing persons -- Investigation.
- Copyright:
- 2008
- Edition Description:
- Hardback
- Publication Date:
- September 2008
- Binding:
- Hardcover
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 280
- Dimensions:
- 8.5 x 5.5 in
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