Customer Reviews

Between Here and April

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(22)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I very rarely read a book in one sitting but this book grabbed me and didn't let go. Elizabeth Burns starts to remember her friend's mysterious disappearance when they were children and it unleashes a torrent of memories within her herself and her hometown. The subject matter is true, but as the author says, the "why" is what is still left to fiction. A unflinching look at motherhood and those emotions that go with it are stripped bare and shown with terrifying reality. This book not only explores aspects of motherhood, it also provides a look back at "modern" medicine's myths regarding woman's health issues. It's horrifying to realize that April's mother was actually under a doctor's care when this act happened, and that so little was done to help her at the time. With references to Susan Smith and Andrea Yates, "Between Here and April" sweeps you into to the dark world of depression. I found Elizabeth's own story at times to be intrusive to the tale of April, but didn't put me off finishing. I found myself examining not only my feelings about motherhood but that of my mother and my grandmother. Simply captivating.

This novel describes what happens as the protagonist, Elizabeth Burns, becomes fascinated with understanding the story behind the death years ago of her best friend from first grade, April. As the story progresses, we discover, bit by bit, the story of April's mother, Adelaide, that ultimately makes clear the desperation and hopelessness that can lead some women to commit the ultimate betrayal.

Kogan's first novel is well written and captivating. I stayed up far later than I should one night to finish it. However, there were certain aspects of the plot that prevented it from being a truly great novel. Elizabeth remembers WAY too many details of the conversation and setting of encounters she had back in first grade to be plausible. Interviews with people from Adelaide's past conveniently divulge realms of right-on- target information. A trip to Adelaide's psychiatrist produces written transcripts from a handful of therapy sessions that just happen to include, implausibly early in the therapeutic process, a group session including April, that just happens to yield all sorts of valuable insights. Finally, before Elizabeth even has the chance to visit Adelaide's widowed husband, he writes HER a letter asking her to drop her project--out of respect for his privacy--but which then goes on for several pages blabbing all sorts of intimate details about their marriage.

I am guessing that women will like this book much more than men, because there isn't a likable man in the entire novel. Elizabeth's husband is so awful (working until 11:00 pm literally just about every night, and neglecting Elizabeth completely unless it is to request kinky S&M sex) that he is almost a caricature. My major criticism of the novel, in fact, is that it appears to portray women as relatively submissive beings held emotional hostage to the whims of their men... up until the point they take fate in their own hands in a last desperate and tragic act.

Flaws notwithstanding, I recommend the novel because it will grip your attention and get you thinking. Kogan does an excellent job in struggling to render a sympathetic portrait of women who commit monstrous acts, and for that she is to be commended. I look forward to reading more of her work in the future.

"Between Here and April" is a very mediocre book. I will not read it again or recommend it to a friend. I did, however, not want to stop in the middle. The biggest problem is the total lack of character development. Only the main character is developed at all, but even she was fairly uninteresting. Another problem is that all the females in the story had severe emotional disturbances and all the males, except the one homosexual, were totally self absorbed jerks. On the upside, Kogan does a good job of showing the pressures that people face trying to keep a balance good balance between family and career. Also, incase someone is thinking of buying this book for a younger read, it should be noted that this book contains
--SPOILER, maybe--

bondage, a graphic rape scene, and a masturbation scene.

This novel begins as the main protagonist Elizabeth Burns is watching the play Media and suffers another one of her devastating blackouts which come on her for no apparent reason. Even as she awakens to small crowds gathering around her, staring down, her therapist Dr. Leland tries desperately to get to the heart of the problem. A journalist and a TV producer, Elizabeth has of late been feeling empty. Still reeling from an imploding experience from the war in Kosovo, she has tried to settle back into domestic life in New York with her two daughters Tess and Daisy and her husband Mark, a mathematical prodigy. But it is the memory of her childhood friend April, friends when they were six who suddenly disappeared from school, that has most affected Elizabeth. Perhaps it is the mystery of what really happened to April that has something to do with the blackouts, the little girl's disappearance somehow significant, defining a close relationship that was somehow severed. Now in her late thirties, April can barely even remember how they met, but her anxieties have been somehow born from this childhood experience as she tries to transcribe the ghost before April disappears once again.

April's loss was so sudden. The day before Halloween, Elizabeth's teacher Miss Martin, told her that April and her older sister Lily would not be coming back to school, ever, as though their human form had spontaneously disintegrated. Only the kids on the school bus say that April had been devoured by the Loch Ness monster or drowned in the JCC pool or even fed gas. It isn't until Elizabeth is much older that she learns the terrible truth of a young and damaged woman severely traumatized who resorts to killing her two children by suffocating them in her car in the woods, a circumstance made all the more troubling because April's mom Adele was around Elizabeth's age now when she originally did the deed. Driven by a desire to delve deeper into the story and to somehow understand Adele Cassidy's slow disintegration - and realizing she would need research funds to shoot a couple of interviews - Elizabeth gets into the mind of April's mother. Surely Adele must have considered the aftermath of her decision when making it and surely she must have thought of the kind of void she would leave behind. A woman by killing herself along with the children could have not have been driven - if at all - by revenge.

As Adele's troubled and fractured life gradually unfurls, Elizabeth's own brittle careful house of domesticity comes crashing down, her chronic discontent at herself and her marriage to Mark becoming a thick blanket of anxiety that suddenly weighs upon every aspect of her life. When Mark, in bed at night, pulls on a pair of shiny metal handcuffs and dangles them over her head, and asks her to participate in a hyper self-aware bondage session, it becomes all to much for Elizabeth who up until now had never gone beyond playacting. Through her interviews Elizabeth is able to find a direction in unraveling Adele's chaotic life, particularly with the Cassidy's former neighbor Mavis Traub who said that Adele was having an affair with Lenny Morton, a gay man and that she was depressed because she was fat; and Trudy, Adele's younger sister, who ponders at the kind of society that would leave a woman no other choice than to do away with herself and her children. It is these segues between Mavis and Trudy that are jarring with each of their explanations as to why Adele killed herself and her children predominantly influenced by their own biases and experiences.

While Elizabeth's journey is the centerpiece of this novel, it is the topic of filicidal mothers that most resonates. In the end both Elizabeth and Adele are mired in fatigue, husbands, responsibilities and work, "the sticky tar pit", the deep malaise, the nagging sense of a life wasted and the desire to find meaning. Was Adele a cold-blooded calculating murderer, a housewife at the end of her rope, or some other creature altogether? The urge to find out what happened in that station wagon, three decades earlier certainly accelerates Elizabeth's own desire to break out of her rut and find a new direction. Certainly Debrah Copaken Kogan's heroine is a complex and multilayered figure even as the author exposes the layers of denial and pain and the memories of April that have so stultified her over the years. Deeply metaphorical in nature this novel is also about light and dark and where illusion ends and reality begins, reflective of the broken fragments of two inner lives both separated by time but not necessarily by circumstance. Mike Leonard November 08.

A young mother finds herself having flashbacks of a childhood friend, April, who was murdered in a pre-cable-news case of maternal filicide. This repressed memory surfaces during a performance of (cue symbolism!) "Medea," natch (also wait for the descriptions of mother mice eating their young). Luckily, Elizabeth has a background in journalism (war correspondence, no less), so she begins to dig into the story with a vague idea towards turning it into a docudrama. Along the way, she begins to see disturbing similarities between Adele, her friend's mother, and her own life. When does understanding the motives for such a horrific crime cross the line into empathy?

Kogan connects the mother-daughter relationships between Adele's family and Elizabeth's, in some cases too well. They all started to blur together after a while, whether it's Adele and her mother, Elizabeth and hers, Adele and April, or Elizabeth and her daughters Tess and Daisy. The moms are all stressed, depressed, and repressed, to varying degrees, to the point that I had a hard time keeping track of which childhood trauma belonged to whom. Was it Adele who walked in on her mother's suicide attempt, or Elizabeth? Was it April whose mom forgot cupcakes for her birthday, or Tess? If you believe Kogan, every mother out there is one broken dish, one missed flight home, one late period away from a complete breakdown. Postpartum depression in her world is as common as hangnails.

And the men fare even worse. They're absent fathers and indifferent husbands, workaholics, cheaters, rapists, womanizers, wife beaters, and they probably leave their dirty socks on the floor, too. One husband even dares to want non-vanilla sex with his wife! The sick b*st*rd. Again, the male characters are in large part interchangeable. Whether they're ignoring their wives out of malice or cluelessness, the lesson here seems to be, you simply can't count on them, ever. If a woman is slowly disintegrating into a puddle of hormones and MAOI inhibitors, it's because a man screwed up somehow.

This is unfortunate, because it's a story that needs to be told and a topic that needs to be addressed, just not with this level of melodrama and alarmism. Had Kogan stopped with having Adele herself suffering from postpartum psychosis, the book would have been far more powerful. Instead, she beats us about the head with stories of motherhood gone wrong, conflating Adele's crippling depression with every little bump and setback that besets Elizabeth. Look, I felt bad for Andrea Yates as much as humanly possible, given what she'd done, and I thought her husband deserved the chair for his role in the tragedy. But Kogan seems less interested in exploring what happens in incredibly rare circumstances, than in painting a horror story about how any woman could kill her kids at any time. There's an uncomfortable whiff of me-tooism here, as though Kogan wants to glom onto the pain of postpartum depression to make a point about how hard it is for all mothers. (I should have sensed trouble when I saw that Ayelet Waldman had written a blurb. Waldman is an entertaining writer, but having her endorse your book about motherhood is a little like George Bush showing up at John McCain's campaign events - no good can come of the association.)

By the end of the book *I* felt depressed - also terrified and with a violent urge to refill my birth control. I was desperate for any glimpse of warmth or happiness amid all the bleak despair - a loving embrace between a husband and wife, or a mother feeling grateful for her kids, rather than burdened by them. Hell, the arrival of the ice cream truck would have helped lighten the mood a little. Reading "Between Here and April," it's hard to remember that for most mothers (and fathers!), children are a joy. Yes, those for whom this isn't the case deserve a voice, too. But Kogan doesn't so much give them a voice as throw them a big communal voyeuristic pity-party.

Deborah Kogan's novel, "Between Here and April" is a multi-generational answer to the question "what makes a good mother?" Kogan's main character, Elizabeth Burns, is a busy wife and mother-of-two daughters, who is also a television producer. After a fainting incident while attending a production of "Medea", she remembers the disappearance of a childhood friend, who she subsequently finds out was murdered by her mother, along with an older sister. This information sets off doubts about her relationships with her own mother and with her two young daughters. There are some attendant issues with her own husband and a former boyfriend who pops up on the scene.

Kogan's book is well-written, but often strays from her central point of mothers, daughters, post-partum problems, and suicide. It could use some judicious editing. But I enjoyed it and thought about the issues she raises.

This story has a little of everything, and is a great sandwich book (the book read in between two longer, more involved novels). It has enough intrigue and interest to hold the reader enthralled, and it's written in a casual tone so the reader identifies with the main character, a mother who eschewed her challenging career as a journalist to write fluff pieces while she raises her child. The moment she remembers her childhood friend is a little weak (why hasn't she thought of her until now?) but her sudden compulsion to track down the truth is highly relatable. Who doesn't want to discover what happened to old friends?

It's a great premise and a captivating story. Buy it, read it, enjoy it.

It wasn't all that long ago when the field of psychiatry didn't recognize post partum depression and often prescribed Valium for depression. Today we know that post partum depression is real. We've seen a few famous cases where mothers have killed themselves and/or their children. We also know that there are better drugs than Valium to treat depression.

This book recounts the story of a mother who ends up wanting to know what happened to a friend of hers in elementary school. What follows is a gripping story that brings in the topics that I've mentioned. Moreover in trying to find the truth of what happened to her friend many years ago, the main heroine of the story finds out much about herself, her feelings as a mother and her marriage.

This is one of those books that isn't all the comfortable to read. There are times where you kind of know what's going to happen; you know you aren't going to like it, but you read on much like watching a train wreck. The main reason you read on is because the book is well-written. The pace of the writing makes it hard to put down and you like the characters she has created.

Most importantly, there is a positive feeling about reading this book at the end. It is worth reading and chances are you will found yourself gripped story while learning a few things.

This book is built around Elizabeth's search to find the truth about what happened to April, her first grade friend who disappeared from school one day. At the time, Elizabeth couldn't get an explanation from her teacher, and her mother was too busy with a new baby and her own issues to really notice that Elizabeth's friend was gone. The truth of what happened isn't too hard for Elizabeth to find out as an adult. After all, when a mother kills herself and her two daughters, there are newspapers articles, which Elizabeth is easily able to find. But it turns out that her search is really to know the unknowable: why did April's mother do this seemingly unthinkable thing?

On a quest to try to answer this question, Elizabeth confronts issues of postpartum depression, especially in the early 1970s, before it was recognized as a treatable condition, and the common prescription of Valium to help women who were depressed, whether it actually benefited them or not. Although Kogan gets a bit heavy-handed on these subjects, her characters are well-drawn and believable.

Despite increased awareness of the reality of post-partum depression, and depression in general, this book addresses maternal and marital stresses both now, and a generation ago. Elizabeth is the prototypical woman who had a high-pressure, exciting career as an international war reporter and who, all of a sudden finds herself mostly house-bound, working part-time on "fluff" pieces, with a physically and emotionally-absent husband and two young children, and the stress of handling their day-to-day needs. She seems to find herself in this situation as if she were pulled along in her life, with little control of its outcome, which doesn't "jive" with her early career. How did she end up where she is?

After she begins a series of black-outs Elizabeth flashes on a first grade "best friend" who "vanished" two months into the school year. (This set-up is a little strained and, frankly, unnecessary.) In any case, it becomes clear that Elizabeth is very aware that her friend and her sister were killed by their mother in a murder-suicide. She decides to research the event, which was largely ignored in the press at the time, and interviews people who might have some knowledge about the situation to attempt to determine the "why" of the situation, to the extent that one can ever know why someone makes such a choice.

Unfortunately, this book suffers from uneven writing and attempts to tackle too many side-stories such as the protagonist's past lover who suddenly reappears, changes in psychiatry and its understanding of "female" hormonal issues, the pressures of lifestyle changes, and society's expectations of wives and mothers. I felt like there were a lot of unresolved and udeveloped themes - not that I expected "resolution" about the underlying filicide. I also agree with another reviewer that the male characters (except the sole gay one) were two-dimensional caricatures and not very likeable. (I doubt many men would make it half-way through this book.) I felt the book would have been better if the author had focussed more on some of the sub-issues, and eliminated extraneous material (e.g. really delve into post-partum depression and the progress, if any, made in its treatment).