Between Here and April

( 2 )

Overview

When a deep-seated 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—shocking revelations about April's mother, Adele.

Elizabeth, now herself a mother, seeks out anyone who might help piece together the final months, days, and hours of this troubled ...

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Between Here and April

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More About This Book

Overview

When a deep-seated 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—shocking revelations about April's mother, Adele.

Elizabeth, now herself a mother, seeks out anyone who might help piece together the final months, days, and hours of this troubled woman's life, but the answers yield only more questions. And those questions lead back to Elizabeth's own life: her own compromised marriage, her increasing self-doubt and dissatisfaction, and finally, a fearsome reckoning with what it means to be a wife and mother.

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Editorial Reviews

USA Today
"A page-turning good read...A tautly written story with sympathetic characters and evocative storytelling." —USA Today
The Washington Post
"The perfect book club book...An amalgamation of autobiography, true crime and melodrama...The story is so engaging...A credit to this narrator's wonderfully appealing voice: funny, frustrated, likable, totally candid about her desires and failings." —The Washington Post
Working Mother
"[A] haunting page-turner...A compelling look at what it means to be a mother and a wife." —Working Mother
Elle Magazine
"Extraordinary...Fascinating and detailed...This is a story that needs to be told." —Elle, #1 Reader's Pick
Publishers Weekly

How could a mother kill her children? This breathtaking first novel from photojournalist Kogan (Shutterbabe) attempts a heart-wrenching answer. Elizabeth "Lizzie" Burns Steiger, a 41-year-old TV producer/journalist, has a hallucination while watching a performance of Medea at a Manhattan theater; she sees her best friend in first grade, April Cassidy, who was killed by April's depressed mother, Adele, in 1972 in Potomac, Md., along with April's sister. In addition to exploring her memories in therapy, Lizzie interviews the Cassidys' former neighbor and others who knew the family for a proposed cable network documentary, but a priceless Pandora's box-tapes of Adele with her psychiatrist-provides the most startling revelations. Kogan skillfully interweaves Lizzie's struggles with her troubled marriage, parenting and a personal trauma shared in the Balkans with a former lover in this unflinching portrait of filicide, which still manages to find light in the darkness of a very disturbing subject. (Sept.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Reviews
Debut novel from TV producer and photojournalist Kogan (Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War, 2001). In the middle of a performance of Medea, Elizabeth Burns faints. Just before she passes out, she has a vivid, visceral recollection of April Cassidy-someone Elizabeth hasn't thought about for 35 years. Once upon a time, they had been best friends, but April disappeared from Elizabeth's memory just as completely as she disappeared from their first-grade classroom. After remembering this lost little girl, Elizabeth becomes obsessed with finding out what happened to her. It doesn't take long to discover that April's mother, Adele, killed both her daughters and herself, but Elizabeth still wants to know why. As she begins to build her story, Kogan deftly exploits the conventions of the murder mystery to create a sense of tension and uncertainty, but the basic facts of the central murder are never in doubt. The mystery Elizabeth is exploring is the mystery of motive-which is, at its core, the essentially unknowable mystery of each human self. These opening chapters are eerie and gripping. A TV producer, Elizabeth uses her job as an excuse to exhume this long-buried tragedy, and, as she digs deeper, she uncovers unnerving parallels between her life and Adele's. Both women are torn between career and motherhood, and both are unhappy in their marriages. Then she finds transcripts of Adele's sessions with a psychiatrist, and the whole novel falls apart. These documents are about as nuanced-and about as convincing-as a dramatic reenactment on Unsolved Mysteries. Adele ceases to be a complex and tragically compelling figure and becomes, instead, a cartoonishly facile exemplar of postpartumpsychosis. Elizabeth, too, devolves into a rickety collection of neuroses, and Kogan provides explanations for each that make it seem as if there is an obvious, inevitable connection between trauma and symptom. The ending is both predictable and absurd, and Kogan provides a coda that is so sentimental and improbable that it's an insult to the reader. Grossly disappointing. Agent: David McCormick/McCormick & Williams Literary Agency
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“A captivating thriller.”—More magazine

Daily Candy

“Outstanding . . . a haunting eyes-wide openness.”—Daily Candy

Washington Post

"An amalgamation of autobiography, true crime and melodrama. . . . The story is so engaging... a credit to this narrator's wonderfully appealing voice: funny, frustrated, likable, totally candid about her desires and failings...The perfect book club book."—Washington Post

Rocky Mountain News

“This exceptional, riveting novel will haunt you long after you've reached the end.”—Rocky Mountain News

The Barnes & Noble Review
This first novel by the author of the bestselling memoir Shutterbabe flirts with fiction and its opposite in such a way that one may be compelled, upon completion, to find out what is "true." Though the nature of reality is open to interpretation, we have the internet, and in this case, it has partial answers. Elizabeth Burns, the protagonist, and Deborah Copaken Kogan, her creator, share some biographical details: Both returned from war zones to take up marriage and motherhood in Manhattan (Kogan's career as a photojournalist was the subject of her first book); both worked in television; and, most strikingly, both of them had a best friend in first grade who was murdered by her suicidal mother (so claims Kogan on her web site). This last fact comes back to the adult Elizabeth during a performance of Medea and seems quite rightly to be the spectacular basis for a story. She talks her producer into letting her dig up whatever facts she can find and put them together into a documentary. Adele, the mother of Elizabeth's best friend April, gassed herself and two daughters to death in the family car one night in 1972. Thirty years later, Elizabeth tracks down Adele's shell-shocked former husband, her women's studies professor sister, and, somewhat improbably, the transcripts of conversations between Adele and her therapist, which naturally make the reader privy to the long-dead woman's deepest thoughts in her own voice. Elizabeth, meanwhile, becomes alarmed at the emotional parallels between her own ambivalence about marriage and motherhood and those of a suicidal murderess. Though parts of her novel resemble many recent titles on the difficulties of balancing career and motherhood for affluent urban women, Kogan's material -- including rape, war, suicide, and homicide -- certainly ratchets up the consequences and thus the conversation beyond the usual playground chatter. --Amy Benfer
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Product Details

  • ISBN-13: 9781565129320
  • Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
  • Publication date: 11/3/2009
  • Pages: 304
  • Sales rank: 934,090
  • Product dimensions: 5.40 (w) x 8.10 (h) x 0.80 (d)

Meet the Author

Deborah Copaken Kogan is the author of Shutter-babe, the bestselling memoir of her years as a war photographer. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine, Paris Match, Newsweek, Time, Elle, L'Express, and PHOTO, and on The Today Show, ABC News, Dateline NBC, and CNN. She lives in New York with her husband and three children.
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Customer Reviews

Average Rating 4.5
( 2 )
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Sort by: Showing all of 2 Customer Reviews

  • Posted March 28, 2010

    more from this reviewer

    Good Drama

    I was into this book from the very beginning. It kept me involved with the characters and the story.

    1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

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  • Anonymous

    Posted January 5, 2012

    Great Book!!

    I loved this book. I have read it twice and plan on reading it more. Certainly one of my favorites.
    It kinda makes you step back and look at your own life.

    Was this review helpful? Yes  NoThank you for your feedback.   Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.
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