Sebold’s disappointing second novel (after much-lauded The Lovely Bones) opens with the narrator’s statement that she has killed her mother. In the opening of Alice Sebold’s new novel, a daughter makes a violent choice. This is the problem with Alice Sebold’s new novel, “The Almost Moon.” The book starts with the narrator, Helen, killing her elderly mother, Mrs.

| Author: | Vulkree Tular |
| Country: | Russian Federation |
| Language: | English (Spanish) |
| Genre: | Science |
| Published (Last): | 21 May 2018 |
| Pages: | 392 |
| PDF File Size: | 10.78 Mb |
| ePub File Size: | 10.24 Mb |
| ISBN: | 536-1-11628-348-6 |
| Downloads: | 83443 |
| Price: | Free* [*Free Regsitration Required] |
| Uploader: | Tojagal |
I believe every book asks a question of its readers. But books we call literary explore, digging out fresh pockets of subject matter or language, describing what we haven’t seen captured in words.
![]()
Then her having sex with her best friend’s son was even more hard to stomach than her killing her mother. That opening line promised more than the next sixty or seventy pages delivered.
As Helen tells us the successively crazier things she’s doing – dumping the body in the deep freeze, summoning her ex of 23 years earlier, having sex with her best friend’s son – she also takes us back over her life’s previous 49 years of discoveries about her family and herself.
Aug 04, Debbie rated it liked it. Or is the book intended to be a glimpse inside the mind of a murderer? Here is my advice: 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.
I really, really do. The political news journalists like to focus on big city or inner city crimes when in all actuality a lot of the time it’s in the suburbs of small town middle America where behind the picket fences and down the block of identically manicured lawns in a normal looking house lives a person who is crazy as hell. Dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it.
The real narrative time of the story is twenty-four hours. Wow, thanks for this review Sebold seems to delight in shocking her reader. Bad for the people they both affected? The literary, fundamental story of a daughter who kills her mother is rare. 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. I picked up “Almost Moon” because I am a Sebold fan. One has to read the entire novel to find an answer.

As Helen gradually teases out the truth about her father and mother, almsot about her own marriage and family, the reader as gradually begins to understand that opening line of the novel.
The novel stays close to Helen Knightly, its narrator, through each detail of the murder, starting with the senile Clair calling Helen “bitch” and soiling herself.
Not all there …
It is a challenging, moving, gripping story, written with the fluidity and strength of voice that only Alice Sebold can bring to the page. This book was extremely disturbing. But the justifications for murder or instances of crazinesses, however contradictory, keep being larded on, culminating in her father going mad and shooting himself.
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!
There was nothing in this book to raise me out of the murk of this woman’s soul depleted life. The intricate relationship Ms. Helen, the almosy, opens the book by describing how she’s killed her aging, mentally ill mother. I would offer the hypothesis alicd the narrative of the murder of the mother by the hand of the daughter reveals to us daughters such a thick mixture of different poisons that it is difficult to put them in order on the page.
We quickly learn that Clair was bitter about her marriage, which landed her in a boring Pennsylvania suburb. To describe that love seriously is for a daughter a truly complex undertaking. Why she chose to write such complete and utter crap this time is just beyond me. 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.
Oct 27, Caroline rated it did not like it Shelves: In fact, I surmise that Helen’s character shares more tje common with most people, much more than most people would ever want to admit.
She reads it in one night but demands the next day: So I’m still waiting for the book that fully engages with a daughter psychically married to her emotionally witholding mother; or a novel about an adult child’s identification with and fear of an aged, demented parent that comes close to Alice Munro’s portrayal of living with a spouse with Alzheimer’s in “The Bear Came Over the Mountain”.
I think this happens to us all the time, but not on such a major scale.

So the apt question to ask is whether this second novel by the author of The Lovely Noon is, as touted in its extravagant publicity, literary fiction, or closer to a detective novel? First she murders her mother, and then she goes on to do other things that are just as cringe-worthy.
View all 14 comments. Am I supposed to believe that Helen acted out of her own mental illness? I do find Helen to be a believable character. Helen loathes her mother, envies and hates her, has always considered her evil, and, like Electra, judges her guilty of having destroyed her father.
Great imagery, as one comes to expect from Sebold and her friends including Aimee Bender. I mooj did not like Helen or anything she chose to do, in the past or present. Her life and the omnipresent relationship with her mother rush in at her as she confronts the choices that have brought her to that crossroads.
She realized her daughters were her strength and she would do the right thing and accept the judgement that came with her deeds.
The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold
Maybe publishers now would reject such honesty as tame. It was, as I said, worse than the murder she’d just committed, IMO. I had read all the bad reviews of it and thought ‘It can’t be that bad.
