The Almost Moon: A Novel

I borrowed the audio book from the library to listen to for company on my commute. I really wish I had just borrowed the book so I could have finished it in 2-3 days and didn't have to spend over a week with this character. I could not relate to Helen at all; she was self-absorbed, prickly, cold, and full of self-righteousness. I understood why she was that way, but that didn't make it easier to get through the story.

The main character wasn't the only problem. It was difficult to get through the narration--not because of the reader, who was excellent. It was difficult because of the constant shifting between past and present. It was impossible to stay with the story because as soon as it would start to gain momentum, there would be a flashback or a confusing change of scene. I could keep up, but I started not wanting to.

The author's intent seems to be to make you feel Helen's disappointment in life, her frustration and constant wishes for a better life/mother/husband/daughter/father/etc, her truly poor ability to make decisions. She seemed doomed to her fate; everything led up to her making her decision, whether it was out of mercy or the culmination of years of resentment--I just don't care enough about her to speculate. She's not like a friend or an acquaintance who makes me want to speculate about their fate or motivations. I just. Don't. Care.

The reason I gave it three stars is that Sebold really is a good writer and can pull off descriptive sections in a way that other modern writers can't. Though she does tend toward the choppy mundane on occasion, I think that was purposeful. It wasn't appealing at all, but there you go.

I'm only glad I didn't spend money on this one. Thank you public library system!! (If you choose to read it, I recommend the book if you're a fast reader and the audio book if you're not; just get through it.)

The story is about a mother-daughter dynamic that is diseased to the core; a dynamic that had gone on for 40 years and ended when the 50-year-old daughter killed her mother who was dying of dementia. The book is about what happens after the murder including flashbacks that span the duration of that dynamic with some anecdotes that will make your heart weep.

First off, this book is beautifully written. Alice Sebold has a penchant for making the bizarre and twisted lyrical and even ethereal. Her writing made reading this book tolerable. The story itself, however, had a different effect on me. It's very disturbing and heartbreaking. The first paragraph in the book goes as follows:

"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 late0in0life child, but by the time she gazed up at me that day, none of this mattered."

Helen, the 50-year-old murderous protagonist, truly hated her mother, and loved her all in the same measure. As she lets the reader in on her most inner thoughts, reasons and memories, a heavy mental and emotional toll is taken and the heartbreak starts to mount.

One of the most disturbing scenes in this book starts with Claire, Helen's mother, letting teenage Helen fend for herself when a group of six men knock on their door and ask to speak to Claire about an incident that happened in the neighborhood a month back. The men were livid and wanted to hurt Claire, who was scared. Instead of not answering the door, she lets Helen handle the situation while she goes down to the basement and turns on the radio. One of the men ends up attacking Helen, all the while Claire in the basement listening to music.

Every anecdotal story that is recounted by Helen gives the reader more insight into the level of mental illness with which this family is afflicted. The sad part is that Helen is a mother of two adult women and a grandmother to boot. If the pathology is hereditary, which is what the book suggests, how will the rest of the family fare? You'll find out when you read this book, which is not a pleasant read, but it's a window into a world hardly discussed and characters hardly portrayed. For that alone, this is a worthwhile read.

I loved "Lucky" and "The Lovely Bones" but this book was so painful to read that I couldn't even finish it.

The novel was dark and creepy. I could almost feel the protaganist's mind unhinging as she slipped over the brink from hating the constraints of her life trapped as a caregiver to an elderly, mentally ill mother to actually doing something about it.

The story could have been a great thriller, a real look inside of the mind not of the stereotypical killer, but of a woman slowly pushed to the breaking point via years of not having needs met.

What was maddening is that it meandered along with many accomplices and betrayals along the way that were just not believeable. That Helen did not feel any trepidation about hanging around with her mother's newly killed corpse and giving it a bath before dragging it around the house was a clever way of telling the reader that yep, Helen had indeed lost her mind. That Helen's former husband demonstrated equal ease in hanging out in an empty house with his newly-killed ex-mother-in-law took the his character from plausible to just convenient. Nobody in this book seemed to find spending time with the recently killed to be remotely disturbing. Yuck.

Still, I slogged through, finding out more and more eerie, creepy things about the main character's family. The reason I toughed it out was because there was one main question threading through the entire novel...would Helen be found out as the murderer, or would she go free?

In the end, the reader is not given any satisfaction, any closure at all, about this question. It was that moment that made me want to throw the book across the room...I felt the reader had been had, had been duped into searching for an answer that would not be provided. For the disturbing images and implausible situations we were forced to endure, we deserve a decent ending.

It is indeed a case of a sophomore slump for Sebold... having written such a compelling novel like 'The Lovely Bones', it's invevitable that any work that follows would be compared to it - perhaps unfairly.

In 'The Almost Moon', Sebold tries to get into the psyche of how a woman could be driven to murder her own mother. However, instead of gaining reader empathy, the protagonist, Helen, annoys us with her constant 'I just killed my mother, you know' refrain for the next 24 hours that the story takes place in.

She not only gets her ex-husband involved in her heinous act by playing the victim calling for help, she also sleeps with her best friend's son, Hamish, then dumps the unwanted truth on her younger daughter Sarah, who had unwittingly come for a visit, and then dumps her as well at a bar, to sleep with Hamish again, in exchange for a getaway car.

I'm not sure if the protagonist is seeking for moral redemption or escape from her real self, but she comes across as a self-involved character who tries to dispense her guilt on the people around her. The fact that her own father had killed himself - driven to madness by her crazy mother - begs for a reprisal that Helen, disappointingly fails to do, by the end of the book.