April Rising - Softcover

Lemaitre, Corene

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0786708727 ISBN 13: 9780786708727

Publisher: Carroll & Graf Pub, 2001

Synopsis

With hilarious twists and eccentric turns, this zany adventure among the rich and comfortable returns twenty-something Ellen Kaplan to her native Philmont, Pennsylvania, after a two-year jaunt in Europe. It confronts her, too, with the rather declasse fact of April, who has taken up residence in Ellen's bedroom as well as in the bosom of the Kaplan family. Besides which, this April person, who scarfs down junk food and wears nylons, has also managed to convince Ellen's beloved - and now evidently bewitched - big brother to jettison his work on a Berkeley Ph.D. in philosophy. And she's virtually altered the personalities of the senior Kaplans, for the baby-boomer suburban power couple has begun acting like Ward and June Cleaver. Aghast at April's usurpations, Ellen sets out to evict the intruder in the Kaplans' midst before the upstart morphs into an in-law. In the process, Ellen comes to some surprising realizations about her family and herself - not least the mortifying possibility that her arch rival may indeed be a soul sister.

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: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0786708727
• ISBN 13: 9780786708727
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 288