That Birds Would Sing

Things are not always what they seem… and for April Jones, reflecting on her adolescence, deception and truth can feel horribly the same.

When an unexpected obituary in her home town newspaper brings on a flood of memories, April recalls the freshman year that changed her forever, describing the beginning of high school as "a trip across an ocean that would take four years to cross, where there was no option to turn around. If you wanted out, you had to drown."

There was Jasmine, the unknown beauty with the terrible secret, and Alec, a dangerously fearless boy tangled in forbidden knowledge. There was a special student, wounded and naïve, whose scattershot development had outpaced her intellect, and a complicated, brilliant teacher with a fateful Achilles heel. April battles herself to make sense of their journeys and her own, remembering the world that once fell apart around them all as they struggled to grow up. She distills her memories into the very elements that make her heartbreaking recollections so turbulent and their brutal impressions so lasting.

April's dissection of her coming-of-age journey is a laid-bare tableau of society's rigid expectations that are increasingly at odds with the spectrum of ways adolescents change, grow, fall, fail and triumph… and the secrets with potential to destroy those lives in an instant.