BETWEEN HERE AND APRIL
Deborah Copaken Kogan
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Fiction
ISBN: 9781565125629
"With all of its invisible frustrations and sacrifices, motherhood was also a remarkable mosaic-in-progress, with…moments, like handmade tiles, painstakingly inlaid: up close, just a jumble of colors, haphazardly placed in no particular order; from ten feet back, so beautiful you could cry." The problem, as Elizabeth Burns discovers during her journey into the dark, messy, complicated heart of motherhood, is that few if any mothers are able to achieve that distance, see that beauty, when they're deep in the midst of their child-rearing years.
Elizabeth is, at least on the surface, a successful and happy wife and mother to two young girls. She and her family live in New York City, her daughters are happy and healthy, her husband is involved with work he loves, and Elizabeth has even managed to maintain some semblance of a career while raising the little ones. But, behind closed doors, her identity as a wife and mother is in crisis.
Elizabeth feels torn between fulfilling her daughters' emotional needs by staying home with them and pursuing her former career as an international journalist, especially when her old boss and an old lover try to convince her to return to Iraq on assignment. She is growing increasingly frustrated with the long hours her husband spends at work and his kinky sexual demands at home. And she has started having these fainting spells…
With the help of a psychiatrist, Elizabeth realizes that her panic attacks and fainting spells might have something to do with the mysterious disappearance of April Cassidy, who was her best friend when the girls were first graders in 1972. At the time, six-year-old Elizabeth had only a vague idea of what had happened to April; as an adult, however, she becomes haunted by the truth of what actually transpired. April and her older sister were killed by their troubled mother Adele, who also committed suicide.
Elizabeth decides to delve into the unknown story of April's death, talking with friends and neighbors, and eventually probing Adele's own psyche by reading transcripts of her sessions with a psychiatrist. Ostensibly, she is making a documentary film about the event, but as Elizabeth learns more about Adele's tragic existence, she wonders if the story she's uncovering might not be her own story as well.
Deborah Copaken Kogan, a former photojournalist and mother of three, packs a lot into this provocative page-turner. Most of all, readers will be struck by the ignorance, silence and denial that surrounded women's issues, particularly postpartum depression, in the 1970s --- and by how far we still have to go in learning about and de-stigmatizing them today. Kogan writes about issues many mothers have been affected by but have been too ashamed to discuss. With the novel's outstanding book club potential, however, Kogan's debut goes a long way toward bringing these issues out in the open once and for all.
--- Reviewed by Norah Piehl
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