Incredible, I will never forget this one!

books:


	• The Almost Moon: A Novel Alice Sebold Little, Brown and Company, 2007 - 304 pages view larger image
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Well, *I* liked it!

Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon starts with a murder, a clumsy, unpremeditated affair that happens almost naturally. It was easy, Helen Knightly tells us in the book's first sentence:

"When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily."

It's a sentence that makes you want to read more. The book continues:

"Dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it. My mother's core was rotten like the brackish water at the bottom of a weeks-old vase of flowers. She had been beautiful when my father met her and still capable of love when I became their late-in-life child, but by the time she gazed up at me that day, none of this mattered."

One paragraph in and it's clear that you're in for something special.

What follows that delicious opening is the story of how Helen came to kill her mother--the toll that Claire's mental illness took on the family over decades, its unexpected consequences, the mental abuse, the exhausting intensity of Helen's love-hate relationship with her mother. This back story is interspersed with the continuing story of what's going on in the present: what Helen does immediately after the murder (whatever you're thinking, you're wrong), the eventual discovery of the body by outsiders.

That Helen commits murder so clumsily, with only the most amateurish attempt made to cover it up, is a great strength of the book, I think. This is the sort of mess that a real person might make of matricide. And while Helen's behavior after the fact seems bizarre, that too lends the story credence. Who in such circumstances would be fully sane?

While The Almost Moon is not a suspense novel per se, it is certainly suspenseful. What will become of Helen, given the murder investigation and her own feelings of...not quite remorse, is never clear, not until the book's last page. And when it comes the ending is, really, just right. This one's highly recommended.

-- Debra Hamel

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hang in there with this one

I was drawn to this novel because I so enjoyed reading 'The Lovely Bones'. The writing was very good and I liked the way the story was told by the victim. When I stared reading 'The Almost Moon' I will admit that I winced and squirmed a bit while the main character revealed herself and her life with mother. I even came to Amazon to read reviews from other readers just to see if I was getting it and whether or not I should continue reading. Reviews were mixed, so I continued. That turned out to be a very good move on my part. I became more and more immersed in Helen and had to find out what had led her to commit such a crime. I was not disappointed in the least.

I will recommend this to most people I know because you can't find a better "character study" author than Sebold. She brings you in quickly and talk about "things that make you go Hmmm". She makes you wonder how you would react to situations and makes you also wonder how you would have turned out given these hideous circumstances.

Hang in there if you're in doubt and wrap your head around Helen's life. It's worth the trip.

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except for the ending

I love a dark book and this was definitely one of them. A crazy lady with an even crazier mom, always good. I've got to say though, the ending was just awful. It's frustrating to know you could have ended a book much better than the author. I've also read "Lovely Bones" and there was a part towards the end that was the most ridiculous thing I've ever read. I don't think I'll be reading any more Alice Sebold.

Incredible, I will never forget this one!

You have to admit writing a dark and mysterious book is pretty tough whithout trying to sound like a total creeper. I thought this book was magically written and had so much detailing that I feel like I have seen a movie of it. Basically, it is a dark book with a beautiful light about it. I loved it.

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Very dark and disturbing...

I am very troubled by this book. First, I found it so unnerving that someone could write about killing their mother. What kind of person does that? Well, I googled on Alice Sebold to find out and discovered that Ms. Sebold was brutally raped while attending college at Syracuse University. I believe that this brutal act of violence may be the catalyst that has caused Ms. Sebold to teeter on a violent edge that few authors dare to go. This book is about and told through the voice of Helen. Helen grew up with a mentally ill mother and a father who turned out to be almost as ill. Helen kills her 86 year old mother and the book follows Helen through the events that occur after the crime, as well as, Helen's thoughts of her past. There is a small section of the book that gives the reader an idea of what it was like for Helen to be a daughter of a mother like hers and how the title of the book relates to the story. "The moon is whole all the time, but we can't always see it. What we see is an almost moon or a non-quite moon. The rest is hiding just out of view, but there's only one moon, so we follow it in the sky. We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides." "I knew I was supposed to understand something from my father's explanation, but what I came away with was that, just as we were stuck with the moon, so too we were stuck with my mother."

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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