Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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56 of 59 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This Book is Greatly Misunderstood, December 18, 2007
It is fine to not like a book and to say so, but the reasons many of these negative reviews are giving seem very confused. What I believe has happened here is that Alice Sebold is a very dark writer who takes on subject matters that most authors don't and somehow she fell into great success with the Lovely Bones, which is wonderful. The problem is Alice Sebold isn't a typical best-selling author and by that I mean she isn't a sell out. She doesn't write books to please the masses and that is very clear from this second novel.
The Almost Moon is not a book that's going to appeal to a mass audience, mostly because mass audiences want an "enjoyable" book that has a clear-cut ending and may have dark moments but leaves you with a sense of hope. The Almost Moon is none of these things. But does that make it a bad book? I'd like to argue no.
This book is compelling and strange and never lets you off the hook for a second. It challenges your thinking, your own relationships, and that thin line between normal behavior and the grotesque. This may not be "enjoyable" but it is powerful and worthy of anyone's time. I like dark books that go against the grain. The majority of books being written today are sloppy, commercial crap and this is not.
As for those who hated the ending I challenge you to re-think the book. The point is not to have a wrapped up story. The point is to explore the immediate aftermath (24 hours) of a horrible event in someone's life. It ends right where it should. This isn't some murder mystery crime novel that's going to tie everything into a little package like an episode of Law and Order. It's more complex than that.
I challenge people to take on this book and to see it for it is.
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151 of 177 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Why does "The Almost Moon" feel like a sledgehammer to the heart?, October 15, 2007
On September 30, 2007, I posted an admiring review about Alice Sebold's first novel, "The Lovely Bones." That book was a literary sensation in 2002 and sold more than ten million copies worldwide.
Sebold was gracious about her success, but seemed a little baffled that millions would interpret it as a sentimental message of hope - because she herself, despite overcoming great personal adversity - isn't a born optimist. In "The Lovely Bones," she parsed violence without being graphic and explored relationships with a delicate hand. Her detached and deconstructive writing style - then and now - reminds me of the great Joan Didion.
Unfortunately, the success of "The Lovely Bones" works against Sebold in "The Almost Moon." I believe it will anger readers who made her first novel a blockbuster. The title refers to someone who's not all there - a celestial body in periods of darkness - hiding bits of itself to the naked eye. It's a story about things we hate about ourselves, things we go to great lengths to hide to meet society's demand to be "normal."
While "The Almost Moon" is a superbly crafted tale of madness, it's also a house of horrors better suited for readers used to the savage imagery of Luis Buñuel, Man Ray, Salvador Dali and David Lynch. It's as surreal and unpleasantly graphic as one of Francisco Goya's Black Paintings, a monster eating one's child. Unlike "The Lovely Bones" - which unfolded dreamy observations with subtlety - "The Almost Moon" arrives like a sledgehammer. It feels deliberate and unflinching, as if Sebold had no interest repeating the atmosphere that made her first novel a critical and commercial success.
Helen Knightly is an artist's model near 50. She murders her mother Clair - who has dementia - after Clair loses control of her bowels. (Sebold owns the template for writing dazzling openings too compelling to ignore, pulling you into a riptide that won't let go.)
But "The Almost Moon" quickly takes a sharp turn into the bizarre - and becomes an incessantly bleak novel of mental illness that leaves nothing to the imagination - sometimes in ways more disagreeable than shocking. However true it reflects the things we think about, it's one of the darkest works of 2007. Any non-crime novel that explores, for example, the swirling blood patterns left behind on a staircase wall from a man who falls after shooting himself - isn't aiming to be a breezy read during the holiday season.
During the next 24 hours, Helen Knightly feels liberated and caged. She succumbs to sexual and subjectively deviant impulses others might try to suppress. But she still has the presence of mind to annotate her behavior in ways which show she's no dummy. She washes and drags her mother's body to the basement. She has sex with the 30-ish son of her best friend, who's all sensuality and no substance. She thinks about Clair, her sarcastic, reclusive, once beautiful and now dead mother.
Helen recalls her dead father (loving and gentle but also mentally ill, who liked to carve wood into whimsical shapes). She thinks about her ex-husband Jake (supportive present-day accomplice), her two daughters (apparently normal), her art teacher pal (for whom she poses in classes as a model) and her neighbors (generically nosy and friendly). She thinks about her best friend Natalie (unhappy but in love with a construction worker) and Natalie's son Hamish, Helen's aforementioned one-night paramour.
Is Helen herself insane? Does she get away with murder? Without giving away the ending, we sense her fate can't be as bittersweet as Susie Salmon's in "The Lovely Bones." Life's cumulative disappointments and low self esteem prevents Helen from planning too far ahead or from expecting too much from the world. She's forever trapped in the muck of low expectations.
In sum, Alice Sebold remains a dazzling writer. She doesn't preach, hates sentimentalism and keeps her prose deceptively simple. She cares more about relationships - and the events which pull them in every direction - than about churning out a potboiler every two years. She's become a thinking person's horror writer, exploring the wreckage of dysfunctional people after hooking you with a stunning premise.
But by sticking to her guns, exploring the gory truths of mental illness, adding layers of misery to ensure Helen's story feels plausible - Sebold challenges the paying reader to enter a hell from which there may be no return.
Even if "The Almost Moon" is an accurate depiction of mental illness, I wonder if it really breaks new ground in a work of modern fiction. Ironically, the same uncompromising approach we admire about Sebold - makes her second novel too harrowing to recommend to everyone.
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31 of 37 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Broken Lives, January 14, 2008
Mental illness, and other serious disabilities, almost always have a profound effect upon families and the individuals that make up those families. The Almost Moon tells a story about one such individual, Helen Knightley, whose mother has suffered from severe agoraphobia all her life and as the novel commences is sliding rapidly into senile dementia. When Helen impulsively smothers her mother, who has just soiled herself and continues to snipe at her daughter while she attempts to clean her up, the severe repression that has always crippled Helen is violently ripped away. In the course of 24 harrowing hours, the truths of Helen's life and identity rush to the surface with almost unbearable clarity.
Sebold wrote The Almost Moon using a combination of stream of consciousness and memory. Readers who are not comfortable with novels based upon irrationality, and inner rather than overt forms of action, will probably dislike this novel. But mental illness is illogical. Watching Helen come to terms with what she has done, and why she has done it, is a slow, unpleasant process. But unlike those who found the ending of this book inconclusive, I found it to be clear and, well, logical. I think I know very well what is about to happen. I won't say more to avoid spoilers.
I Know This Much is True by Wally Lamb, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon, are other titles that deal with mental illness in a way that seems more palatable to many readers. But, though I find myself in the minority here on Amazon, I enjoyed The Almost Moon as well, dark as it is. Life is not always sunny and warm.
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