April Rising: A Novel - Hardcover

Lemaitre, Corene

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0786706546 ISBN 13: 9780786706549

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 2000

Synopsis

When she returns home after two years out of touch with her family, Ellen Kaplan discovers that her parents have taken in a working-class stranger named April, so Ellen decides to reclaim her position in the family at April's expense

About this title

About the Author:

Educated at New York University, where she read drama and trained in Stella Adler's studio, Corene Lemaitre was editor for the source magazine and a full-time writer. She lives in London.

From Publishers Weekly:

"Who's been sleeping in my bed?" takes on new meaning in Lema?tre's fractured fairy tale, a scathingly zany take on Goldilocks. When 20-something Ellen Kaplan returns home to suburban Philmont, Pa., after a two-year romp through Europe, she expects to find her family unchanged. Unfortunately for Ellen, her bed has been taken over by her brother James's new girlfriend, April, a junk-food-eating, born-again Christian from a blue-collar family in California. In addition to displaying April's collection of porcelain Jesuses, the formerly macrobiotic Kaplans now stock the pantry with Doritos and Tastykakes to please the intruder, and at her urging, James is about to abandon his philosophy Ph.D. at Berkeley in favor of a career as a trash collector. Although Ellen did not send a single postcard during her travels, she resolves to recover her rightful place in the family, wresting power away from April before it's too late. A domestic war is soon raging, but before long Ellen is forced to acknowledge that she and April have more in common than she would like to admit. Though she is, as her father says, "lazy, spoiled and megalomaniacal," Ellen is also a wittily acerbic narrator, and her descriptions of secondary characters like her technologically precocious younger brother, Matthew, who lives in the basement with his computer, are sharp and funny. Lema?tre spells out the Goldilocks connection early on, rather than trusting readers to put two and two together on their own, and some of the novel's satirical observations are shrill. Still, when a series of epiphanies causes Ellen to recognize that she has not been betrayed by her family, but rather has wronged them by taking them for granted, irony is subsumed by a story with a moral for spoiled children everywhere. (Jan.) FYI: Lema?tre hosts a Philadelphia TV talk show, Authors Etc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0786706546
• ISBN 13: 9780786706549
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 276