The Almost Moon By Alice Sebold

Kendra

I wanted to believe that the backlash against this book could be explained by general disappointment about Sebold's second novel not living up to The Lovely Bones. Um, yeah. Not only did it not measure up, but I don't even want this book in the same ROOM with my other books. It really and truly is that bad. I tried, people. I tried. But when I spent 4 hours on a plane learning how to do Sodoku just so I wouldn't have to read one more heinous word of this novel, I knew that I was going to have to throw in the towel and say some terrible things about Sebold's latest effort.

We all know she can write. Even when her words are polluting my air, it's obvious she can write. Why she chose to write such complete and utter crap this time is just beyond me. The entire book centers around Helen killing her mother. And, you know, that could have been an interesting theme to run with, but Sebold just mangled and butchered it instead. I suspect that maybe I was supposed to feel sorry for Helen, but instead I found her to be thoroughly unpleasant, and I started wishing that she'd go ahead and kill herself, too. After 87 pages, I no longer even cared enough to skim ahead in order to find out what horrible things had happened in her past. In fact, I'm surprised that I ever made it past page 44, which as another reviewer already noted, contains some of the absolute worst lines ever written. No kidding. I don't recommend reading this entire book (obviously), but if you're into brief spurts of masochism, mosey on over to the library and pull this book off the shelf just to read page 44.

Laila

I should preface this by saying that I have never read a book with an accumulative star rating this low before. It also confirms that star ratings are ridiculous - or maybe that one star ratings are compliments in disguise.

Can someone explain to me why a story has to have likable characters? Why someone who is clearly loosing it should act in a way a sane reader finds believable? I'm pretty sure when I read Fight Club I didn't think I would act that way... but she's a woman, so she has to be in fiction that can be quickly accessed and then resolved with a nice bow on top.

Let me be clear: this book is poisonous. It's hits hard, especially to anyone who understand complicated issues between mothers and daughters. But that's what it's supposed to be, it's supposed to be poisonous, it's supposed to disturb the reader and make us feel bad and I thought it was very well crafted.
To me, the character made perfect sense, and I even liked her as much as that is possible. She did the best she could for a long time and then she snapped and did something she couldn't take back. I thought the book depicted that situation beautifully.

Now, I have thing for Alice Sebold: I thought The Lovely Bones was good and entertaining, but my special interest is in those books that were generally described as disappointing, like Lucky and this one. Maybe her way of seeing the world just makes sense to me, and maybe that doesn't bode that well, but just because she describes the world out of the viewpoint from characters who may not fit exactly in the nice, uplifting story with a bow on top formula so predominant in so-called "women's fiction" doesn't mean it's bad writing.

Orsodimondo [part time reader at the moment]

LA FIGLIA OSCURA

Helen Knightly, l’io narrante, esordisce così al primo rigo:
Alla fin fine, ammazzare mia madre mi è venuto facile.

Devo dire che Alice Sebold mi ha abituato a incipit che non si perdono in giri di parole, incipit fulminanti e senza preamboli.

description
Frederic Leighton: Elettra sulla tomba di Agamennone. 1869 (collezione privata).

C’è odio nel gesto di Helen. Ma anche amore. E, forse, perfino pietas. Per la madre, e, finalmente, verso se stessa.
L’anziana era una donna bella e affascinante: ora è avvinta dalla demenza senile. È stata una madre poco presente, probabilmente una ‘cattiva madre’, ma forse soprattutto una madre inerme.
Adesso, è stata trasformata dalla malattia in una specie di figlia vecchia. Figlia della sua stessa figlia.

A parte Elettra che uccide la madre Clitennestra (*) nella tragedia di Euripide, il matricidio è molto meno frequentato dalla narrativa del patricidio. C’è voluto Freud, la psicanalisi tutta, perché questo lato del vivere emergesse.
L’essere ‘madre cattiva’, e ‘figlia oscura’, sono conquiste e scoperte della letteratura più recenti. E ancora si fatica ad accettarle, ad accoglierle.
È stata Elena Ferrante nel suo articolo del 2007 per presentare l’ultimo (finora, spero!) romanzo della Sebold, a evidenziare questo aspetto.

description
John Collier: Clitennestra. 1882 (Guildhall Art Gallery, Londra).

Forse perché il legame madre-figlia e figlia-madre è più insondabile di altri, più misterioso. Almeno per la metà maschile del mondo.
O forse non è davvero così tanto più complesso e misterioso, è solo che per orrenda tradizione semi universale il ruolo della donna è più marginale rispetto a quello maschile, e quindi, c’è voluto più tempo e più impegno per scandagliare l’universo femminile.

Ancora oggi, nel terzo millennio, a chi viene attribuito il dovere di sacrificare la propria vita per badare agli altri? Alla donna. Chi è che assume il ruolo di balia e badante? Più spesso, la figlia femmina.
E ora che le conquiste in campo medico fanno sì che la vita (ma non la salute) si sia allungata sempre più, la figlia femmina rischia di arrivare a settant'anni continuando ancora a occuparsi dei genitori. Una gabbia, una prigione per chi non ha un rapporto assolutamente meraviglioso e idilliaco con la madre o il padre (e a quanti capita davvero?).

description
Pierre-Narcisse Guérin: Clitennestra e Agamennone. 1822 (Collezione privata).

Non c’è dubbio che Alice Sebold abbia accolto appieno questa apertura del mondo moderno: i suoi romanzi sono tutti viaggi nella psiche femminile. Esperienze strepitose di un mondo altro per me uomo.

Dopo due romanzi nei quali l’io narrante era vittima a tutto tondo e subiva, lo stupro e la violenza nel primo, la violenza e la morte nel secondo, arrivata al terzo romanzo, Sebold racconta una vittima che si ribella e commette il crimine massimo: uccidere la propria madre.
O forse, il crimine massimo è uccidere il proprio figlio/a? E allora, che cosa sarà la tua prossima storia, tenera, ironica, rabbiosa Alice?
A ciascuno il suo dolore.

description

PS
In un’intervista Alice Sebold ricorda questa storia: la madre della scrittrice Patricia Highsmith bevve acquaragia per abortire. Ovviamente il tentativo fallì. Highsmith finì per scrivere romanzi di rara misantropia. Eppure continuò a prendersi cura della madre fino alla morte, che anticipò di poco la sua.

(*)
Elettra manda un messaggero da sua madre a dirle che ha appena partorito. Clitennestra accorre, una madre che corre per aiutare sua figlia: è allora che Elettra la uccide.

description
Maria Callas-Medea nel film di Pasolini. Ma questa è un’altra storia.

Rhian

Horrible, horrible, horrible. Bad in every way: terrible sentences, dreadful unbelievable characters, boring story. Includes this line, "This was not the first time I had been face-to-face with my mother's genitalia." Her genitalia has a FACE!!!! Downhill from there.

Monty

I couldn't put this book down so I read it in two days. What I especially liked about the book was how the author used stream of consciousness thinking (flash backs)to explain the thoughts and actions of the main character during a 24 hour period just before and after she kills her demented mother. Also, as unreal as the events seem in the this story, they stem from the main character (who grew up in a disturbed family) making some minor poor choices under stress, then making a major poor choice (she killed her mother) which put her on a path of no return. I think this happens to us all the time, but not on such a major scale. If you haven't read The Lovely Bones, then I recommend that book as well.

NOTE: It's interesting that most people who read or starting reading this book didn't like it. Nevertheless, I think it's a good read.

Rita

Spoilers...

The subject matter was hard at the start, but it got easier as the book progressed, because I started to really dislike the main character.

Yes, I understand and appreciate the dichotomy of the mother/daughter relationship, especially a dysfunctional one. I get the love/hate thing. I really, really do. But, the fact that she owned her hatred of her mother at such an early age--she acknowledged it and expressed it, I mean she OWNED it, but then she only acted out the "loving daughter" part, was so disingenuous. But, if we're to accept that this is who that character was, then she was just weak and sick. And continued to be weak and sick, all through her marriage, hurting her husband and her children all while openly hating the mother that she insisted on caring for, and then finally killing that mother. The character was 49 at the time of the story, and in all those years, from the first spark of hatred of her mother when she was little, did she ever think that this was all unhealthy and wrong? She was closed off, cold, cruel, pushing everyone away, even her children (which I found so hard to read, that she went on and on about her dislike of her older child) and never had any inkling to change? Oh, she saw the one therapist once, who was apparently just as nuts as she was, and talked about her hostility towards his "probing." It was all just too weird to accept.

Then her having sex with her best friend's son was even more hard to stomach than her killing her mother. I mean, that feels almost incestuous, doesn't it? The son was grown, and apparently had a crush on this woman for a long time, but still, I don't understand how you can have sex with someone who is the child of your best friend. Someone you've had an adult role in raising since birth. It was, as I said, worse than the murder she'd just committed, IMO. After I realized that I truly did not like this woman, anything about her, it was even harder to plod through her narcissism over her figure (realizing that if she had not taken such good care of her figure she wouldn't have had the strength to murder her mother, nor be attractive to her friend's son--oh GAG me!--and her going on and on about how plump her friend was, in a not-nice way--again, who is SHE to put down anyone!?!)

See, the book wasn't presented as maybe the diary of Charles Manson would be, like it's supposed to be a spectacle of horrors, hard to get through because that level of sickness is just so out of our understanding. It was presented kind of like we were supposed to maybe sympathize with her and root for her. I think she was supposed to come across as weak and having made bad decisions, but "damaged" by her upbringing. I think we were supposed to recognize that she made bad choices, but also feel compassion for her because of what she'd gone through, and her conflicting emotions. I didn't though. At first I did. But, then the stuff with the friend's son came in and the stuff about the kind of mother she was, and that she just never even tried to stop wallowing in her own illness. I just thought she was selfish and a horrible person.

The end was mildly redeeming. Yes, she was going to take responsibility for it, finally, and try to repair her broken relationships (from prison, or a mental institution, more likely). But, it was too little too late.

What I truly hated about the book was that it is the opposite of what I like and what I hope to achieve in my own writing. I am all about stories of people who come from sickness and bad luck and through whatever (the unexpected love from others, their own strength, some luck that graces them, assistance from doctors, teachers, mentors), they are able to get out of the muck and make something of themselves. I'm not even talking big
success stories like The Persuit of Happyness. Even just little ones like Dead Poets Society, where the big prize is having the courage to ask out a girl, or tell your parents you don't want to be a lawyer. Just to get over the negative weight and live a normal life. I am all about stories of rising above whatever handicaps you were born with or dealt early on. I like to see stories where people were born "freaks" and then somehow normalized that title, made it work FOR them, taking what they've been given and gaining strength from it.

This was the opposite of that. This took a person, put her in a bad situation (yes, her childhood was bad, but it wasn't the worst I've seen by any measure) and then held her head under its water until she drowned in it. It took what could have been a quirky person from a less-than-ideal upbringing, spun her around and turned her into a freak, instead of taking a person out of a horrible place and turning her into a hero. I just don't like those kinds of books, I guess. I just had a really, really hard time with this woman's lifetime of submission to weakness and selfishness and felt that there shouldn't even be a book written about this kind of person unless it is clearly stated that we are supposed to genuinely dislike her. And, well, I genuinely dislike plenty of selfish and weak people who have done real-life bad things to me and others, so I just don't want to invest my recreation time to it, too.

Leslie

This book was extremely disturbing. The main character is introduced as seemly a normal woman whose elderly mother is entering her final years and at the stage of facing a nursing home or care facility. Even after she kills her mother, she tells the story as if this is just sort of a bummer day, almost, "Oh my gosh, I killed my mother. I don't want to be late for work." Ironically, I was even lulled into moments where I was not completely horrified at what just happened--and continues to happen through the next 24 hours.

Through the book, we learn about her mother's mental illness, as well as her father's, and we see the domino effect of mental illness.

A lot of people rated this book very low, and I have to admit I had difficulty getting through it. I am a young adult librarian, and I still struggle on whether I want to add it to the collection because it is told in such a real way.

In fact, I have seen women like the main character in the news...i.e. minister's wife kills husband...and I wondered what happened to her to make her do it. This is her story. The slow erosion of rationale thinking due to mental illness and emotional strain. I think it is a very unique book in its perspective and helpful in analyzing the thought processes of the mentally ill, which is why I recommend it.

Ann

When I read The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold’s bestselling first novel, I thought, now what? What does an author write after that? How could she possibly top this novel?

Three short years later Alice follows with a realistic, maybe too real, new novel, The Almost Moon, that promises to ease its way up the bestseller list in a short time. In what seems to be Ms. Sebold’s tradition, The Almost Moon is a dark tale, not a cozy quick read. This story voices some of the worst emotions and fears one could imagine.

Helen Knightly, a middle-aged woman looking after her elderly mother, commits an act that most could not fathom. In the first sentence of the book, Helen tells the reader in her casual voice—as if she were a friend—that killing her mother came easily. This personal point of view sets the tone of the story and somewhat prepares readers for the emotional ride to come. The book only covers a twenty-four-hour period, but because of the way the story is told readers will hardly notice. I must applaud Ms. Sebold for the courage to tackle emotions and thoughts that readers will not want to identify with and a subject that will surely generate plenty of criticism.

The intricate relationship Ms. Sebold weaves between mother and daughter brings to the surface what most families fight to bury in their histories. The unhealthy bond between Helen and her mother Clair is evident when a young Helen eats a whole cookie sheet of candy Clair has made. Helen is punished by having to remain at the kitchen table until her father comes home. She becomes quite ill, but manages to stay in place.

The crazy dance between mother, father, and daughter has a long-lasting effect on Helen’s reality. She helps her father make existence possible for Clair by taking on an adult role with the neighbors and outsiders when Mr. Knightly is out of town. At one point, Mr. Knightly is gone for three months on business, or so says Clair. While he is gone, Helen is greeted with sad nods and casseroles from the neighbors, which she hordes in the deep freeze while mother and daughter live off peanut butter crackers and cheese toast. Helen fears one day she will be responsible for feeding both herself and Clair. She fears her father will never come home.

Sebold reveals a whole set of legacies passed on from one generation to another. Helen grows into a teenager perceiving her family as normal. It’s not until a neighbor points out the mental illness laced through her parents’ actions that Helen feels some freedom and validation. Her feelings about her mother were given a name: insanity.

Clair Knightly is not the most likeable of characters. She came to motherhood late in life only after her lingerie modeling career became nonexistent. The simple detail that Helen grew up in a house where the walls and tabletops were covered with framed black and white photos of Clair wearing lingerie was enough to make me sympathize with Helen, especially as more of the backstory unfolded. But just as I became willing to understand Helen’s act, Helen would say or do something that pushed me away. Whether intentional or not, this distancing was an excellent technique.

I believe every book asks a question of its readers. With Helen’s whole story unfolded, revealed, does this give her the right to take the life of her mother? Is her act a punishable offense, or do readers find something about Helen that helps them hope for her freedom? I’ll leave this for the readers to decide for themselves.

Alice Sebold’s unflinching ability to stare down the everyday violence lurking under the surface deserves both acknowledgment and praise. While this book may bring debate, and is not recommended as a casual read, I strongly suggest The Almost Moon to lovers of writing well done.

Jade17

I made it to around 60 pages before I chucked it across the room. Horrible horrible horrible all over the place, pathetic writing with sad, unlikeable characters.

Jason Pettus

(My full review of this book is much longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

I freely admit it; that as a man, there are sometimes things that women do that utterly baffle me, and will probably continue to baffle me until the day I freaking die, just like it is with women regarding men. And that's because, avoiding any kind of qualitative judgment, I think we can all agree that there are fundamentally different ways that men and women sometimes react in different situations, based on a variety of criteria and societal concerns, and that in some cases such actions and behaviors can seem incomprehensible to the other gender. You don't hear of too many men, for example, who just lose their marbles one day, drive their kids to a nearby lake and calmly drown them; not too many male jilted lovers go on insane cross-country drives in the middle of the night, with bizarre weapons in tow and while wearing adult diapers so that they don't have to make bathroom breaks, all in the name of some crazed crackpot scheme thought up in the middle of the night regarding stabbing their lover's new lover then turning the knife on themselves.

It is one of these very topics, in fact, that fuels the entire storyline of acclaimed author Alice Sebold's latest brilliantly twisted dark little novel, The Almost Moon; in fact, that's what the very first chapter of the book is devoted to, is a real-time blow-by-blow accounting of a middle-aged woman suddenly going insane one day and murdering her senile, sh-t-covered old-age mother, just randomly one afternoon while over at her house and preparing to clean her like a baby for the thousandth time in a row now. What the rest of this delightfully wicked story is about, then, is a fascinating and detailed look at the decades leading up to this moment, told in a non-narrative "hyperfiction" style that jumps from early-childhood to just yesterday at the blink of an eye, painting one of the deepest portraits you'll see in contemporary literature of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, and of all the teeny, tiny, strange, entertaining, depressing, hopeless, fascinating ways the relationship affects the way the woman deals with each and every other person in her life too. It is utterly a female story, the kind that can only be told by a female author, but told in a way so that I as a male reader can get it too; I love such novels, as I've mentioned here before, and am always glad to come upon another one like I have this week.

So why does Sebold's name sound so familiar, you're thinking? Well, because she's the mousy dark novelist who seemingly appeared out of nowhere in the early 2000s to write The Lovely Bones, an emotionally devastating crime thriller and meditation on loss that happened to have been written from the standpoint of a murdered teenage girl as she watches the proceedings from heaven. I read it too when it first came out, and like many others it made me openly weep in public; it became not only a runaway bestseller, but is also slated to be the next movie by Lord of the Rings impresario Peter Jackson. Oh yeah, that Alice Sebold!

This is only her second novel, after taking a break between them to pen the true rape memoir Lucky; and it is the best kind of second novel to write, to tell you the truth, one that...

Sara (sarawithoutanH)

Before I start this, let me just say that Alice Sebold’s writing style is not the problem. This is a definite example of how good writing does not always equal a good novel. The writing was compelling enough that I did not DNF this book. But, in my opinion, the plot itself was absurd. I am shocked that this is from the same author who wrote The Lovely Bones. I’ve never read TLB, but I’ve known many people who have cited it as a great book, or even their favorite book. This book feels like it came from a different planet. How can an author who wrote such a critically-acclaimed novel also write this? As Zac Posen would say on Project Runway, the taste level just isn’t there. (I’ve been binging too much PR and I might be the only one to get this reference).

I like to think that novels are stories that authors feel they *need* to tell. I have no clue why anyone would want to tell this story. I’m not against dark stories. In fact, I loooove dark, fucked up stories. But this is just dismal. Helen is a miserable person and the only thing this novel does is confirm that she had a terrible childhood and her mother’s mental illness went untreated her whole life. Her father also suffered from mental illness, but it was skirted around and not as vilified as her mother’s. There’s a point where Helen is confronted with the truth of her father’s illness and she makes a conscious decision to never blame him for anything that has gone wrong in their family, and yet she constantly blames her mother and says she’s always wanted to kill her. It was just confusing. The story is told in a stream of consciousness style, and I just wasn’t really here for it. I really did not like Helen or anything she chose to do, in the past or present.

Also, usually when the main character of a novel murders someone, I kinda want them to get away with it. With Helen, I was was ready to dial 911 myself, if only to end the book. I’m not sure what I was supposed to feel while reading this. Bad for Helen? Bad for Helen’s mom? Bad for the people they both affected? All I really felt was annoyed.

Don’t read this book if you enjoy using your time for productive things. I’m sure you could find a better story that encapsulates a dark family dynamic and how mental illness affects us, personally and as bystanders. Honestly, I *know* you could find a better book with these themes.

Caroline

This was just not worth the effort it took to get through it, at all. I could have gotten over the main character murdering her mother (which is within the first sentence, so don't panic about being spoiled) if she weren't so unpleasant in every other respect. First she murders her mother, and then she goes on to do other things that are just as cringe-worthy.

I also could have gotten past how horrible a person Helen was...if they novel had any kind of point at all. I kept reading in hopes that it would resolve anything, and it doesn't. All it does is confirm mental illness and a horrible childhood, all of which is pretty obvious from the first chapter, and that's it.

The writing itself drove me a mad, as well. It's written in more stream-of-consciousness, so the story jumps all over the place because Helen's mind jumps all over the place. One second she'll be narrating how she's panicking over what she did to her mother, and the next she'll be five years old and talking about some important event that happened to make her the way she is now. I can appreciate stream-of-consciousness, but not when it's so disjointed that it confuses me as to what is going on.

Yes, the characters are fleshed out. Yes, Alice Sebold has a great command of the English language and is very poetic at times...but this was just awful.

After I read the last page (which made the whole thing feel like there was no point, what with the lack of resolution and all), I felt mentally ill for reading the whole thing.

Carin

Sebold has a gift for poetic tone and thoughtful metaphor. I love how you're just toodling along, reading away, and suddenly, BAM! she hits you with something like: "She looked up at me and smiled. 'Bitch,' she said. The thing about dementia is that sometimes you feel like the afflicted person has a trip wire to the truth, as if they can see beneath the skin you hide in."
Or: "I got her standing with ease, but once she was upright, she collapsed in my arms. It was all I could do not to drop her, bringing both of us to the ground. As I adapted to the balance of holding her full weight, I could not help but think of my father, how year after year he carried the burden of her, apologized to the neightbors, dried her copious tears, and how this body had folded into his over and over again like so much batter until the two of them became one."

The book spans one 24 hour period, beginning with the narrator killing her mother. It weaves past and present together to form a picture of the family and how events of the past shaped the events that initiate the novel. It has a dark veil drawn over it, infusing most of it with an isolated and suicidal tone.
It was not perhaps the smartest move on my part to follow it up with a marathon of Cold Case Files on A&E.

J. Kent Messum

I enjoyed this novel, though not as much as Sebold's 'The Lovely Bones'. I didn't think it was stellar, but I thought it was solid. A lot of people took a massive shit on this book because they disliked Helen's character so much... but you know what? There are lots of ugly characters in the world, and they are far more believable than the fictional heroes and heroines we blindly champion because they offer us no incentive to wake up and smell the coffee.

I like REAL characters, offensive or otherwise, and Sebold definitely showed us the other side of what a protagonist in a novel can be. In fact, I surmise that Helen's character shares more in common with most people, much more than most people would ever want to admit.

Florence (Lefty) MacIntosh

Seems like a lot of people hated this book… I'm not one of them. There’s mental illness in my family so I appreciated the author giving a voice to how the day-to-day living with someone with a mental disorder impacts every person they touch. Wickedly funny and really well written, Sebold has a great lyrical style, paints her characters so real they breathe; I empathized. Admittedly the author leaves a lot of loose ends but I didn’t have a problem with that, enjoy a story that isn’t all tied up in a neat bundle – convinced Sebold made a deliberate choice in the ambiguous ending, a choice to leave it to the reader’s imagination.

"“I have never liked the phone. Ten years ago, during a misguided fit of self-improvement, I pasted smiley-faced stickers on the phone in my bedroom and on the one in the kitchen. Then I typed out two labels and taped them to the handsets. “It’s an opportunity, not an attack,” they read.”

Lorraine

THE ALMOST MOON is a brave book by a courageous writer. After the phenomenal success of THE LOVELY BONES, Alice Sebold could have chosen to write a sophomore novel in which she once again gave readers a sympathetic, utterly likable narrator like Susie Salmon. Instead, she writes through the voice of Helen Knightly, and Helen tells the reader, right from the beginning, that liking her is going to be a challenge:

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

The book, told in Helen's voice, is about the 24 hours that follow the matricide. But, in that day, Helen will veer back and forth between a present, in which she deals with the consequences of her actions, and the past, in which the costs of her mother's closeted mental illness make themselves clear to Helen in a series of flashbacks.

Helen's behavior, while at first difficult to comprehend, becomes more understandable as she narrates her story. Some readers will undoubtedly find Helen such a difficult narrator that they will be unable to empathize with her. It's part of what shows Sebold to be a writer who is willing to take risks. Creating a character who, at first read, appears vain and unempathetic, is to take the risk that a reader will not stick with the book until the end. But, as more of Helen's story is told, one sees how damaged she was by a childhood in which her parents' demons injured her. And Sebold's language and skill as a writer give to Helen a depth that demands that the reader "hear her out."

As Helen tells more of her story, we see the shadows of her parents' demons move across Helen's skin. She grew up in a house of secrets but Helen makes her living as a nude art model, and yet, while Helen is nude almost every day, she is rarely naked. She had learned to hide from the people who love her: her ex-husband, her best friend and her best friend's son, and Helen's two daughters, as effectively as Helen's agoraphobic mother had hidden from the world. Killing her mother forces Helen out into the open, and Sebold lets us see an imperfect woman who struggles with all-too-human issues albeit in a violent and extreme way.

Gabril

“Alla fin fine, ammazzare mia madre mi è venuto facile”.

Con un incipit così traumatizzante comincia la storia di Helen, figlia di una madre psichicamente instabile (aggravata da una vecchiaia demente) e portatrice di un debordante sentimento di odio-amore che viene via esplicitato, capito e giustificato dalla storia che Helen stessa ripercorre.
Voce disperatamente lucida, voce pulsionale che produce gesti agiti direttamente dall’inconscio, voce che si spezza, si arrampica, si arrotola su di sé e poi si dispiega, in un ritmo che è allo stesso tempo serrato e disteso, tanto che la definizione di ‘thriller esistenziale’ è quanto mai calzante.

Ecco che la madre, il corpo del desiderio primario, viene distrutta nell’illusione di potersene liberare, di annullarne il potere soggiogante, ma anche per il bisogno di vendicare un padre troppo amato, della cui fine la si ritiene responsabile. Insomma, la tragedia di Elettra rivisitata: oggi, nella sonnolenta e gretta provincia americana e attraverso la disfunzionalità emblematica delle famiglie contemporanee.

E proprio il corpo è al centro della narrazione di Sebold: quello della madre viene raccontato nel disfacimento naturale degli anni, nella sua riduzione a freddo cadavere, nella cura con cui viene poi lavato e accudito; quello della figlia è ridotto a oggetto estraneo o allontanato da sé in una sorta di doppio alieno: è un corpo nudo di modella, un corpo esposto per essere ritratto dagli allievi della scuola d’arte; è un corpo pulsionale che chiede di essere scopato, ovvero semplicemente messo a tacere nell’amplesso. È infine un viso estraniato, allucinato, che non si riconosce allo specchio, quando la fine di tutto appare vicina.
La fine, o quasi.

Kellie

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.”

Tucker (TuckerTheReader)

Gary Guinn

“When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.”
How’s that for an opening line? Helen’s mother needed killing, and Helen was just the person to do it. Except she wasn’t.
Sebold’s second novel, The Almost Moon, is the story of fifty-two-year-old Helen, whose father committed suicide when she was a teenager, and her spontaneous act of mercy/revenge on her eighty-year-old mother and the chaos that follows. Helen’s ex-husband, her two adult daughters, her best friend since childhood, and her best friend’s adult son are all affected by, and drawn into, the chaos.
Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, was universally praised. The average rating on Goodreads, with 1,655,999 ratings is currently 3.7. Most of the ratings and reviews are high. But when looking through the ratings for The Almost Moon, which has an average of 2.67, with about 32,000 ratings so far, what jumps out is the incredible disparity of opinions. There seem to be about as many 1 and 2 star ratings as 4 and 5 star. Many of the people at the bottom of the ratings loved The Lovely Bones, but were disappointed, angered, revolted by The Almost Moon. The reasons varied. Some could not stomach the basic premise of killing your mother. Many could never sympathize with the protagonist, Helen.
I come down on the higher end of the ratings, largely because I was amazed by what Sebold did with narrative time. The real narrative time of the story is twenty-four hours. Everything “happens” in that short time. But the experiential time for the reader is Helen’s entire lifetime. The narrative is in first person, from Helen’s point of view, and Sebold moves Helen’s consciousness through time flawlessly, weaving past and present into, dare I say it, a crazy quilt. I found the characters, both past and present, believable and sympathetic and powerfully motivated. As Helen gradually teases out the truth about her father and mother, and about her own marriage and family, the reader as gradually begins to understand that opening line of the novel.
I do confess the novel was slow engaging me, even after the surprising opening line and chapter. That opening line promised more than the next sixty or seventy pages delivered. I usually give a novel fifty pages to get its hooks in me. If I’m not hooked by then, I set it aside. I stayed with The Almost Moon beyond that point because of Alice Sebold’s beautiful prose. Very early the narrator says, “As darkness descended, so did the cold. I looked down at the length of my mother’s body, wrapped in double blankets, and knew she would never feel the uncertainties that come with the fluctuation of air or light again. ‘Over now,’ I said to her. ‘It’s over.’”
So I stayed with Helen a little longer, and it wasn’t too long before I was glad I did. This novel isn’t for everyone, as the wide-ranging ratings indicate, but if you’re a fan of literary fiction, I’d recommend giving it a try.

Diane

I LOVED: The Lovely Bones, and although several people told me that this book was totally bizarre, I had to read it and judge for myself.

Once I began Almost Moon, I could not put it down. I could understand how a 49 year old woman, a product of a dysfunctional, mentally ill family, could snap under extreme pressure and murder her elderly mother who suffered from dementia. This dark, serious novel, made me smile on more than one occasion by the author's use of clever writing techniques. I loved the way that the entire novel took place in a 24 hour period as well.

Alice Sebold did not disappoint me with this latest GEM. Read it for yourself and do not be mislead by some of the negative reviews you may read. You will miss a unusually wonderful book!

Anne

In 2003, my brother bought me Alice Sebold's first novel, The Lovely Bones, for Christmas. I was into it from the first page, and I couldn't help crying my eyes out. Later, I read her memoir, Lucky. I didn't think it was quite as well done, but it was about a very powerful topic, and it gave me some respect for where Sebold had come from and how much she had overcome. So, I eagerly anticipated getting this one from the long library waiting list. The Almost Moon tackles the difficult subject of family mental illness. Given my work recently, this is an area I am very interested in - how genetics affects behavior and how families attempt to normalize "crazy" behavior. Unfortunately, like mental illness, this book is all over the place. Sebold switches from present time to the main character's childhood to her life with her husband and children - and does so in a way that is haphazard and often confusing. The main character (unlike John Nash in A Beautiful Mind) is completely one-dimensional and thoroughly unlikeable. Her behavior is erratic and nonsensical, but instead of painting a picture of mental illness and its devastating effects, I simply found this book boring and irrelevant. It doesn't seem like Sebold did much research into the area before she wrote this. Rather, it's like she just took pieces of bizarre behavior and threw them together hoping something would resonate. For those who have never read Sebold, please read The Lovely Bones. For those who read The Lovely Bones and loved it as much as I did, DO NOT read this book. It will only serve to taint your image of Sebold's talent.

Yennie

Have a healthy relationship with your parents? Then you probably won't relate to Helen, the protagonist who confesses to killing her mother in the first sentence of the novel. Alice Sebold doesn't expect you to understand what Helen has done-- even Helen doesn't quite understand it fully. Effort and compassion is needed just to start understanding the complexities of this mother-daughter relationship, and Sebold does a beautiful job exploring that aspect of an act that society condemns in a knee jerk. Great imagery, as one comes to expect from Sebold and her friends (including Aimee Bender). The ending will annoy plenty, but one has to remember that the ending of a book is not necessarily the conclusion of a story; I thought it was perfectly timed and thought provoking.

Sherree W

So, this is the only book that I have felt a duty to review.

People who are uncomfortable with the many topics broached (topics that don't make for polite conversation) may feel that this book goes too far...

I live with an Alzheimer's patient. She is turning 90 in July. She is my mother.

Luckily, thus far she is not too much like the mother in this book, but I was gripped from the first pages. The situation and the thoughts of the protagonist, while hard to take and easy to deride, are slightly different if you have experienced a loved one's slow deterioration into a different person from dementia.

Sadly, this widely panned book is one of the finest I've ever read. Very raw, very real! Please don't discount it because of people who aren't able to 'get' this one. Alice Sebold did an amazing job and must have known she would be risking a lot to write this. I for one am very glad to have read it.

People who only want to read books where the protagonists are simply good people who make good choices are missing out on some amazing experiences. Not every book has to be about the struggle between 'Good' and 'Evil', the struggle within each of us every day is far more complex and occasionally far more interesting.

Lain

This is one of the worst books I've read in a long time. Not because the writing is poor -- in fact, just the opposite. Sebold is such a talented writer that what she's done with this book is nothing short of a travesty.

Am I supposed to feel sorry for Helen, the daughter of a mentally ill mother she ends up killing in her old age? There isn't enough hurt and anguish in her for me to believe she did so out of long-simmering rage. Am I supposed to feel outraged at the brutality of the act? Clair is so unsympathetic that I can't muster even the slightest cringe. Am I supposed to believe that Helen acted out of her own mental illness? If so, there isn't enough evidence to convince me that she's insane.

All in all, the book left me disgusted. Disgusted in the characters, disgusted in the plot, disgusted that I spent so many hours reading it.

Sportyrod

First line: 'When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.' What a way to start a book.

I enjoyed reading the present-time day as the events unfolded. I was less interested in all the memories connecting the story and found them getting in the way of a good read.

I laughed many times, especially the parts where she is thinking how she is going to broach explaining the awful things she's done. I love her reckless self-destruction.

I like the way the protagonist's perspective might make some readers feel that her actions were understandable and being on the brink of madness.

I would recommend this to any book club and people who like a crazy, obscure storyline.

Michelle

Let me start off by saying that I love Alice Sebold. 'Lucky' and 'Lovely Bones' were two books that stayed with me long after I finished them.

That being said, I hate to say that 'Almost Moon' was such a disappointment to me. I had read all the bad reviews of it and thought 'It can't be that bad.' Unfortunately, it was.

Was it because the story was about an unsympathetic narrator who kills her aged mother in the first chapter? Perhaps.

The rest of the story unfolds as Helen both revisits memories of growing up and deals with what she has done.

Here is my advice: Don't bother reading this one. If you want to read Alice Sebold, pick up either 'Lucky' or 'Lovely Bones' instead.

Brittany B.

Awww! The low rating is so unfair... It's dark fiction about a woman tumbling out of control. It is fiction!! I'm sticking to my first impression. Despite the overwhelming consensus here at GR and prior disagreements with my own friends, I liked this book.

Anyway here's my story about this book--
I read this 4-5 years ago, when I happened to be going through a rough spell. I really liked it. It was dark, but it was not depressing to me. I saw a contrasting humor in parts of the story that seemed really messed up. I remember so many things that made me cringe and laugh at the same time. (For ex., keeping dead woman's braid under her pillow??!!...) I stayed up all night reading it. When I finished, I was excited to recommend it. (Huge mistake!!)

Within the week, I recommended this book to an older friend, who also happens to be a well-respected therapist. I even loaned her my copy.
When I saw her again, I asked, "Oh didn't you love it?!?"
At this, she became very serious and said, "NO! I did not love it. I absolutely hated it!! It was Disturbing! I have trouble understanding what you found humorous about that story....
Do you think you need to talk about it?"

So my friend/therapist basically questioned my sanity over this book....

In her (or my) defense, I am different now, and I avoid depressing books as much as possible. (I blame my hormones for the change.) I'm far more sensitive to books, music, and even commercials make me tear up. So I doubt I would like this book as much today as I did then. But who knows?!?

My point is only that you should give the book a try, if you like the author. Forget about the ratings. Also it's not nearly as intensely depressing as Lovely Bones.

*****I do recommend
Lucky by Alice Sebold. It is her own story, and it is one of the very best books I've read. (Those aren't empty words. Check my profile page, it's there!) Extremely honest and moving. And I think it will help readers understand why her books are edgy and darker than other main stream authors.****

Kate

I got to page 100 when I realized I was not going to finish it. I don't know why I lasted that long. It is a very strange book, and the topic (going mad) is better covered elsewhere. At least, that's what I think the topic is. I was constantly confused who was who in the book. Was the narrator talking about a daughter, a sister, or a best friend? Was the man mentioned the father or his son who had the same name? Whatever. I'm looking for something else to read.

Title	:	The Almost Moon
Author	:	Alice Sebold
Rating	:
ISBN	:	0316677469
ISBN-10	:	9780316677462
Language	:	English
Format Type	:	Hardcover
Number of Pages	:	295
Publication	:	First published January 1, 2007

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

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The Almost Moon Reviews

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