The Almost Moon: A Novel by Alice Sebold
|
List Price: Our Price: $0.01 You Save: $24.98 (100%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of The Almost Moon: A Novel
Book Review: Terrific !!
Summary: 5 Stars
I found this book to be very well written. Once I started reading it I couldn't put it down until I was finished.Book Review: Good book but a hard read...
Summary: 4 Stars
Fans of Alice Sebold may not enjoy this deviation from her norm, but if you can treat "The Almost Moon" as its own entity in the face of such successes as "Lucky" and "The Lovely Bones", then you may just enjoy it.
Half of the reviews out there are from people who hated it and called it a book "fans should stay away from" but if you enjoy her work, you should give this a try for yourself. Sebold has a fluid writing style that makes the story enjoyable to read, despite being about a very grim subject.
Sebold's main character, Helen Knightly, starts off the book by letting you know that she has just killed her mother, Clair. Helen was summoned to her mother's house, as she had been many times before, to assist her with the common everyday tasks of cleaning herself and changing her clothes. Helen then realizes suddenly that she is tired of the burden of her mother and ends her life.
What transpires throughout the book from then on are the events that occur over the following 24 hours since the incident, peppered with flashbacks from Helen's life as a child and beyond that help to flesh out a motive for why Helen did what she did.
Clair, as is told to us, was cold, mean and insane--the character being based on Sebold's own mother. Helen's father was tormented by his love for his hopeless wife and eventually ended his own life. Helen has no one to turn to as a child, except for her one and only friendly neighbor, Mr. Forrest. The rest of the neighborhood is intent on making the family move, due to an incident that occurs that showcases Clair's depth of insanity and lack of human connection.
Helen is now a divorced, middle aged woman with 2 grown children and a career as a nude model. In the wake of killing her mother, Helen sleeps with Hamish, the 30 year old son of her best friend for whom Helen feels a pang of guilt. She goes back and forth over how she has known him since he was a baby but some people sleep with people 20 years younger than them. But then, those people are not best friends with their lover's mother. This helps to add to her already messy situation and instability and causes her to question whatever shreds were left of her morality. And if things weren't bad enough, Helen's ex-husband, Jake, involuntarily ends up as an accomplice in Clair's murder.
If you have grown up in an environment similar to the one Helen grew up in, it is easy to relate to her but makes reading the book a bit more emotionally difficult at times. You find yourself actually hoping at certain points that Helen literally gets away with murder for all of the struggles her mother put her through.
But at the same time, you hope for justice, because you can understand how deeply disturbed her mother was and yet Helen killed her when she was at her most defenseless, being elderly and completely deranged. If Helen had already put up with the worst of what she was ever going to get, why would she kill her mother now when she had so few years left to live as it was? But then you can understand that someone as cold as Clair who is now so dependent on Helen could cause Helen's resentment to flare, in a "why should I now take care of her when she never took care of me?" kind of way.
Will Helen get away with murder? Ultimately, should she? Was her mother truly as terrible as she made her out to be or did Helen finally just reach her breaking point? Will there be a calm resolution to this horribly messy situation? Read "The Almost Moon" and find out!
Book Review: You have to know crazy to get this book.
Summary: 4 Stars
I was drawn to this book for two reasons. The first is because I had previously read another book by this author and I wanted to see if I would like this one better. The second was the first sentence in the book...no, I will not give it away...go find it!
After reading that first sentence, I found myself completely absorbed by the book. I could not put it down. Flipping through the pages of this book was like reading pages from a journal that could very well have been my own. Though the words and experiences were different from those that lie within my own tortured past, the feelings this account roused from me were extracted from somewhere deep within my soul.
Reading this book, I was sent spiraling into a life of hurt, pain, torture, agony, and sacrifice. Almost Moon is Helen's story of the life she knows, the agony of her memories, and the future she dreads, with the chapters jumping between and through each in turn.
The puzzle pieces of Helen's life are scattered throughout the book and slowly the reader brings the jumbled mess into comprehension. As these jagged chunks of life begin to form what is now the essence of Helen, the reader comes to love her and understand some of the choices she has had to make. We witness the deterioration of her mother's mind and body. We learn of the chaos concealed within her father's tired mind which was sadly overshadowed by the needs of his wife. We ache with her as she uncovers family secrets that have been buried so deep and so long. We watch and cry as she gives up the one person who loved her and was there for her. And we sympathize with her fear for the pain that she may or may not inflict upon her own children. And Helen suffers through all of this misery for a woman who could have cared less about the devastation she was causing for her only daughter.
Now Helen finds herself in a situation that is turning from bad to worse. Unfortunately, she ends up getting her loved ones involved which does nothing to alleviate the situation. In the end, she finds she has no choices left, but one...
Though I will not divulge my reasoning's here, I identified with Helen very much. As I read about her fears for her children and the relationship she had with her mother, I could not help but see myself in this character. Sadly, this book did not receive good reviews. I believe that in order to understand this book, you have to know Crazy. If you don't know Crazy, you just cannot appreciate Crazy.
I still have not made my decision about Alice Sebold as a writer. The ending to this book was too hurried (almost as if she realized she had run out of pages and just stopped writing) and the last book I read had enormous potential but left me flat. I guess I have to read her first, autobiographical, book to make my final judgment.
Even though this book had a quick, seemingly unfinished ending, I must say it was well worth my time. I'm not even sure I can say it was good. It was...familiar...recognizable...at least to me.
I guess if you want an opinion of the book, you will have to read it and form your own.
Book Review: A Painful Novel to Read
Summary: 4 Stars
Alice Sebold is no stranger to violence and her writing reflects that fact. Sebold, who was raped at the end of her freshman year at Syracuse, bluntly told of that experience in Lucky (as in "lucky to be alive"), her 1999 non-fiction debut. A few years later she struck gold with an unlikely success about a brutally murdered fourteen-year-old girl who narrates her own story, including all the murder details, in The Lovely Bones. In both cases, Sebold was criticized by some readers and critics for being too explicit about the violence that characterizes her work.
So readers of The Almost Moon, Sebold's second novel, should know by now that she is not bashful about exposing the dark side of human nature and that, in the process, she pulls no punches. But she has outdone herself this time.
Helen Knightly admits in the book's opening sentence that killing her mother was easy. It was not something that she had planned to do that day but she finally reached a breaking point while struggling with the mechanics of cleaning up her 88-year-old dementia-suffering mother after she had soiled herself. It was easy, and she had no regrets about the murder or how nonchalantly she handled the body when it was over. She finally felt free of the mentally ill woman who had ruined her life and it seemed a wonder that it had taken her so long to reach this point.
After calling her ex-husband to confess what she had done and to ask for his help, Knightly spends the next 24 hours reflecting on her horrible childhood and trying to come up with a plan that will allow her to escape punishment for her crime. When she realizes that the police already consider her to be the prime suspect in her mother's murder she has to choose between surrendering, running, or taking her own life. None of the choices are simple, and she seriously considers them all.
The Almost Moon is a painful book to read, especially the first few chapters that detail the murder and immediate minutes following the crime. Many readers will consider, as I did, abandoning the book at some point during those early pages. But those who stay with it will be rewarded with an interesting look into the mind of Helen Knightly, the middle-aged product of the dysfunctional family that shaped her into the woman she is. Although she never becomes a sympathetic character, it does seem sad to see that Helen will not manage to escape her mother's influence. This realization, in fact, makes her wonder which of her own two adult daughters is most likely to succumb to the mental illness that seems to have cursed her family from one generation to the next.
This book is not for readers who demand and expect happy endings from their reading. This is life through the eyes of Alice Sebold. It is not pretty, but it is brutally honest.
Book Review: A Harrowing Story About Mental Illness
Summary: 4 Stars
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.