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The Almost Moon (2007)

The Almost Moon (2007)

Book Info

Author
Rating
2.65 of 5 Votes: 2
Your rating
ISBN
0316677469 (ISBN13: 9780316677462)
Language
English
Publisher
little, brown and company

About book The Almost Moon (2007)

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.

I picked up "Almost Moon" because I am a Sebold fan. Like most of the reviews I have read, I loved "Lucky" and "The Lovely Bones". In both of these books there was the beautiful and inspiring as well as the ugly and devastating. Almost Moon is a whole other thing. It contains only the ugly and devastating.The subject of this book is Helen, who quickly suffocates her mother in the first chapter, and takes the rest of the book to explain her actions, never becomes sympathetic. Instead, It only becomes more and more apparent exactly how dangerously narcissistic and psychotic she is. Yes, her mom was nuts and her dad committed suicide. And yes, she tried a short stint at therapy only to stop for the most superficial reason - she didn't like the sculptures in her therapist's office. And throughout the book we learn about morally questionable things Helen has done in the past as well as watch her commit even more crimes against humanity. And never does she seem to self-reflect - gee, that was wrong. God, I really hurt people when I did that. Instead, she is full of excuses and paper thin explanations. So I read this book in entirety with an ill feeling in my stomach. Never have I less enjoyed a read. There was nothing in this book to raise me out of the murk of this woman's soul depleted life. However, I have to say I disagree with the NYT reviews. I do find Helen to be a believable character. And I do find her narcissism and hollow but addictive love of her insane mother also believable. I do find how their is little to redeem Helen in our eyes believable. This is insanity. Insanity has its own rules. And Sebold takes us into this quite unpoetic mindset. It's a revolting read, but not without truths.In summary, I would never recommend this book to anyone. I don't mind reading a dark book once in a while but I still want my reward. Some nugget of beauty and transcendence. There book offers nothing in the way of that. This book is certainly well written and an accurate portrayal of a family gone bonkers but I want more from a book. But I guess I am just a romantic.

Do You like book The Almost Moon (2007)?

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.
—Kendra

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.”
—Florence (Lefty) MacIntosh

Disturbing. Probable yet improbable. Quirky. Curious. Eerie.As I first started getting into this my initial thought was that this was so absurd that I actually laughed. But when I thought about this premise more closely I realized it's not absurd at all. Just browse past any of the various true crime cable channels or even prime time nightly news stories and it will be affirmed that this story is not only disturbingly probable but could have been lifted or adapted from one of these re-enacted accounts. 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. Who often never get help because they live the illusion of normal and end up passing on damaged parenting to poor innocent children who in turn grow up, like mother like daughter carrying on the family traits of dysfunction, putting it nicely. Disturbed, genetic criminal, if we put it bluntly. This is the case with agoraphobic Claire and poor Helen.  "I couldn't see my fathers face clearly in the dark, so I watched the tops of the fir trees, which were outlined by the blue night. I like to think that your mother is almost whole, he said. So much in life is about almosts, not quites. Like the moon, I saidThere it hung, a thin slice still low in the sky.Right, he said. The moon is whole all the time, but we can't always see it. What we see is an almost moon or a not-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 out lives based on it's rhythms and tides."This is a somewhat sad strange story of a woman who grows up playing third fiddle to her parents who were such disturbed tortured souls. Helen and her father bare the strain of her mother Claire's what seems like undiagnosed, untreated mental instability and agoraphobia for decades. They have a love hate relationship with the whole existence of their family unit. What happens when it is all just too much? At some point the dam has to break. This is that story. Through the absurd present, somewhat eerie and strange flash backs to the past leading up to the fateful day when everything changed all hints lead to the why of it all. This was different. You start off with the climax, so to speak and then you delve deeper into the characters as you go learning what made them tick. By the end if the book you have the full picture and you get it. On the one hand I understand, on the other there is still no excuse. On the one hand the whole family needs to plead insanity and get on some medicine ASAP. On the other hand a chain reaction was caused by the negligence of all and all guilty parties should be punished. At times I thought is is just so absurd, at other times I thought this is someone's story. I'm going with a 3 stars on this one. I likes the way the author presented this and kept my attention through most of the book I would say, up to about close to the end when I just wanted the boys in blue to show up NBC TV style and just put an end to this nonsense. It drug on toward the end. I also didn't like the ending or lack there of. I do recommend it to readers of this particular author and to those who watch True crime shows or read this type of novel. Here's another way of looking inside at it.
—Debbie

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