Between Here and April by Deborah Copaken Kogan

Elizabeth Burns is living a typical American life. She is a wife, mother and tries to fit in freelance writing to maintain her journalism career. A childhood memory of her 1st grade best friend, April, starts Elizabeth looking deeper into the past. April disappeared suddenly, and Elizabeth was never given a real explanation. Delving into the past through newspaper articles and interviews with people that lived around their childhood community, Elizabeth discovers the horrible truth that April and her sister were killed by their own mother in a murder/suicide that was never really talked about all those years ago. As Elizabeth examines the life of April’s mother, Adele, she sees the struggles and demands of motherhood that Adele went through as well the parallels in her own life.

This novel explores many issues that American women deal with, such as motherhood, marital issues, depression and more. Kogan has taken a realistic look at issues that many times are pushed under the rug and ignored. The exploration of Adele’s life prior to killing her own children and committing suicide from so many different perspectives creates an image of a character that experiences many normal problems in life. Allowing Elizabeth’s own life to, in many ways, mirror the life that Adele lived paints a picture that many women will relate to.

Reviewed by Kim Patton

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