Book Review/Between Here and April
Between Here and April By BILL DUNCAN The News-Review Deborah Copaken Kogan’s “Between Here and April,” is a debut novel that came about because the author, like many of us, could not imagine what would cause a mother to kill her own children. What Kogan has written may not hold all the answers, but it surely will open the subject to discussion and perhaps even lead to help for mothers struggling to cope in an unforgiving world. The reader will surely find within the novel’s pages reasons why some lives spin out of control. The protagonist is Elizabeth Burns, a TV news reporter, who begins the story as an adult who is plagued by unanswered questions about what happened to her elementary school classmate, April Cassidy, who had simply disappeared three decades earlier. Like any good reporter she starts digging for facts and becomes obsessed with learning the truth about April’s disappearance — the truth that was hidden from her as a child. She finds the answer in an old newspaper file, but it is an answer she struggles to understand. April and her older sister, Lilly were victims of a murder-suicide. Their mother, Adele Cassidy, drove the family station wagon into a wooded area and used a vacuum cleaner hose to fill the car with carbon monoxide. Elizabeth is determined to find out what would cause a mother to take the lives of her own children. Elizabeth, whose own workaholic husband, Mark, all too often leaves her alone and lonely to care for their children while he works unpredictable hours, feels compelled to dig deeper into what had driven Adele to such a desperate act. Kogan handles this obsession like a bulldog investigative reporter, having her protagonist interview everyone remotely connected to Adele, including the friends, family, police investigators and even the psychiatrist who had been delving into Adele’s mental state. In doing so, the author has Elizabeth step behind the sensational newspaper headlines and electronic media nightly sound bites. As a journalist, both Kogan and her alter ego, Elizabeth know how quickly the story is forgotten until the next news story about a troubled Susan Smith, the South Carolina mother who drove her car into a lake and drowned her two children, or Andrea Yates, a Texas mother who drowned her five children in a bathtub. Korgan, a famous photojournalist, whose non-fiction “Shutterbabe: Adventures in Love and War,” was a recent national best seller, is determined to make the reader understand what would drive a mother to take the lives of her own children. She has written a page-turning novel of secrets, guilt, and betrayal that may be billed as a fictional novel, but whose situations are all too true. As Elizabeth probes deeper behind this veil of silence, she becomes empathic with Adele and can even sympathize with Adele’s desperate mental state. In her search, Elizabeth finds the dusty, yellowed typewritten case notes of psychiatrist Dr. Sherman, with the shocking revelation of questions and answers revealed in the psychiatric sessions. Kogan skillfully puts the reader alongside Elizabeth in a Starbucks coffee house as she reads through the clinical notes unveiling a troubled mind. While the novel is definitely on the dark side, Kogan manages to inject humor along the way. There is a particular funny vignette, at least from a male point of view, about the difference in the restroom facilities for men and women. During intermission at a play Elizabeth and her husband, Mark, attends, Elizabeth, talking to herself, says: “I spent the intermission waiting my turn to use one of the three stalls available, watching the men move in and out of their facilities with the efficiency of cars on an assembly line…while on our side precious time was lost spreading toilet paper over seats, pulling down hose, hiking up skirts, tugging on tampons, locating flushing mechanisms, pulling up hose, straightening out skirts and fidgeting with locks which never seem to want to close.” When she finally emerges, her husband says: “Were you in the bathroom this whole time?” “No,” she snaps, “I was in Stockholm fetching my Nobel Prize.” Kogan probably added that bit of humor to explain to the male reader the daily extra burdens women have, not only in child bearing and child rearing, but also in just daily existence. “Between here and April,” is a riveting psychological suspense that will perhaps change the way the reader views the heinous crime of infanticide and focus efforts to prevent these tragedies. (Bill Duncan can be reached at bduncan@nrtoday.com or by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)
A novel
By Deborah Copaken Kogan
Hardcover $23.95
Algonouin Books of Chapel Hill
To be released Oct. 7, 2008