This seemed intriguing at first, and I enjoy novels about mental disturbance. However, it got more and more boring as it progressed, and by the end I didn’t care about any of the characters and only finished for the sake of finishing. The protagonist went loopy without being the least bit interesting or comprehensible, and what good is a novel about madness if it can’t draw you into its fascinatingly deranged world? ( )

Not nearly as good as Sebold's first book Lovely Bones. A daughter is in a caregiver relationship with her extremely difficult and ungrateful mother. ( )

too depressing, didn't finish

I actually found this book a good read. I can't say it was enjoyable, because it's not that type of subject matter, but there were numerous times that I totally empathized (and sympathized) with the main character.

THE ALMOST MOON is no THE LOVELY BONES, and I don't believe it was meant to be. Some people are going to like the book, and others will hate it, but I think it was a good showing of Alice Sebold's range in fiction. ( )

I've read both of Alice Sebold's other books and truly enjoyed them. A day later and I'm still not sure what I thought about this one. A daughter, Helen, in her late forties, her mentally ill mother and her deceased father. It was very interesting to read about how Helen grew up in what was a very difficult life, the mother was extremely mentally ill and was agoraphobic, not leaving the house for years at a time.

I think the most interesting part to me was the affect that this mother had on the life of her fully grown daughter, Helen, and that even after she was married with children, she felt the need to protect her mother and chose to return home.

Clearly the most shocking part of the book happened within the first chapter, when Helen killed her mother. It wasn't premeditated but something that almost just kind of happened. The worst part almost wasn't the actual killing of her mother but the hours that ensued after.

I felt that I had just really gotten into the book towards the end and thus was very disappointed when it ended in what I felt was a very unsatisfying way. I wish there had been more of a conclusion but then again, my imagination can always make up some pretty imaginative ways to end the story! ( )

This was an awful book. It had promise, it really did. The narrative seemed scattered and incomplete. The relationship with the younger man seemed awkward and unnecessary. The main character's hatred towards her own mother was shocking and rather sad. All in all, I did not enjoy this book. ( )

Did not like this at all, almost quit reading ( )

The Almost Moon is a shocking story about a woman named Helen Knightly who has been taking care of her ailing mother for some time. As soon as you read the first line, you know that Helen ends up killing her sick mother. So with that information, the book takes off with Helen trying to figure out what to do with her mother's body. All the while she is having flashbacks of her life and her mothers odd behavior. It turns out her mother was suffering from severe depression from early on.

While reading this book, I found myself in shock quite a few times. I almost felt like I was watching a train wreck, I knew it was bad, but I just couldn't look away. Not to say that this book was 'bad', but the author writes several graphic and shocking passages. I really was stunned. I felt bad for Helen as she recounted the memories from her childhood. However, I didn't particularly like Helen's character and I found some of the things she did to be atrocious. I did feel bad for Helen's mother who suffered from such a horrible mental illness and her father who struggled to keep his family together.
As strange as the story was, I found Alice Sebold's writing to be exellent. Several times I found myself going back and re-reading a passage. ( )

I loved The Lovely Bones. I say that upfront because if you think The Almost Moon is anything like it, you will be disappointed. I really wanted to like The Almost Moon, but I couldn't. I hated the main character, Helen, from the beginning. I don't care how dysfunctional your childhood was, how the heck do you justify killing your elderly mother because you don't want to clean up after her bathroom accident and you don't feel like calling the ambulance and putting her in a nursing home? And after you kill your mother, how can you justify cutting off her braid and keeping it or dragging the body to the cellar and putting it in a freezer? Can you say SICK and TWISTED?? And on top of all that, how can you think it's a good idea to sleep with your best friend's son?? Shifting from the present to the past and showing her father's mental breakdown and eventual suicide and her mother's agoraphobia didn't make me feel sorry for her. Was it Sebold's intention for us to feel sorry for Helen, or did she make Helen over-the-top because we weren't supposed to feel sorry for her? I don't know, but because I couldn't feel sorry for Helen, not in the slightest, I spent the entire book waiting for it to be over, for Helen to be caught by the police and put in jail. Sebold wrote an intriguing story, but I like to have some sort of feeling for the main character; I need to care about them, about what they're doing, and I just didn't care about Helen at all. ( )

Rather interesting and frighterning idea. ( )

Deeply troubling and disappointing at the same time. ( )

What the heck was that? I pushed myself through this book continuously thinking "it must get better" but it never did. The writing style was great but the plot line, to say the least was not for me. The most ironic moment? Finding this book on a "Suggestions for Mother's Day" table at a major bookstore. Sure, here you go, happy mother's day mom, this is what I want to do... It's every mother's dream, :/ ( )

The first chapter of this book was horrible. After reading Lovely Bones, I was expecting something fantastic but this book falls far short. After reading some reviews of other readers, I decided reading more would be a waste of time. ( )

I didn't finish this book, cause I was so disappointed. Been thinking about trying again. ( )

I was really disappointed with this book and struggled to read it to the end. Although it is based around the difficult issue of mental illness, I don't think the author deals with it very well. The main character is not likeable and the ending was extremely poor. ( )

I enjoyed this book! I thought it was horrible that the main character killed her mother, despite everything that she had put her through. I found myself wanting her to get away with it, though I can't imagine how someone could do something like that. Then there was the whole situation with her best friend's son---very strange. When she said that she was waiting to see who in the family would inherit the mental illness, I was thinking that she did. ( )

I thought this book was very disappointing. I thought it was very boring and I did not connect with the main character. I understood her hatred of her mother and her desire to kill her. What I didn't understand was her inability to escape her mother. She made it seem like that was her mother's fault. Really, it wasn't. She could have left her mother at any time. No one would fault her for it. By the end of the book I wanted Helen to kill herself. ( )

Well, I can't say I'm impressed. The book was a tumble of thoughts from the main character, interupting the story line consistantly and the ending was just horrid. Horrible depressing and really just lacking, I can't really say it's worth the trouble reading. ( )

Don't believe the lukewarm reviews - this is a good book!

Hmm.

So, this is Alice Sebold of The Lovely Bones fame. Her new book (her sophomore novel) is similar in tone to The Lovely Bones, but very different in character and plot. So much so, that it's gotten me worried.

See, once upon a time, I loved a book called The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Actually, I'll go as far as to say it's one of my all-time favorite books. It concerns five Classical History students at a small, liberal arts college in the Northeast. The students are a secretive bunch, and they get it in their minds to hold an honest-to-Gods Bacchanal. Things go awry, with the force and irony of any good Greek tragedy. I loved it with every fiber of my Classical-history-major being, and I waited impatiently (for ten freaking years!) for her second novel to be released. And when it was, I bought it off the shelf with barely a glance.

It was about a 10-year-old girl in the deep south in the late 1970's. Same tone...but where were my history-obsessed college students? The indulgent and inspiring professor? Where were the people that I related to, Donna Tartt? What did you do with them, and who the hell is this precocious kid, Harriet?

No matter how good of a novel it was (and it did get widespread acclaim), I was disappointed and missed Henry, Bunny, Richard, Charles, Camilla, and Francis...I missed that to which I could personally relate.

So, why am I bringing this up NOW? What does this have to do with Alice Sebold?

I've taken many requests for The Almost Moon at the library. I'd have to say that 2/3 of them are from teenage girls. These are the people that clutch their well-worn copy of The Lovely Bones to their chests and sigh "Susie Salmon!".* I think that The Lovely Bones hit a nerve that
Lurlene McDaniel has been plucking at for years: that of the tragic teenage girl. Stories that hormonal young women devour whilst sobbing into their pillows.

The Almost Moon is about the tumultuous relationship between a woman in her eighties (Clair) and her daughter (Helen). It takes place over a 24-hour period, and consists mostly of flashbacks to Helen's youth, and what it was like growing up with Clair as a mother. It's a tragic tale of frustration and losing control - on both of their parts. It's a wretched story of two lives that revolve around each other, poisoning each other. I skimmed parts of it because I just wasn't digging the melodrama. There are parts of this book that are truly baffling: the things that Clair and Helen do, the way that Sebold writes (there are some god-awful comparisons and squick-worthy observations), and how she jumps around haphazardly from scene to scene, character to character, concept to concept. I didn't enjoy it. It was a huge disappointment.

So, what's the point of this super-long review?

I think that Alice Sebold is going to confuse, and then lose a significant part of her readership. Now, I'm not saying that she should have pumped out another 30 *sigh* "Susie Salmon!" novels. She's an established author now, she can write whatever the hell she wants and we'll buy it. But I can't help feeling concerned for those teenage girls who are impatiently waiting for me to return the book so that THEY can read it with their tissues handy. I think that Alice Sebold will lose them after the first chapter. I just don't think they'll be able to relate to a 60-year-old woman's dealings with her 80-year-old mother in the same way as they did with *sigh* "Susie Salmon!". I feel really badly for these girls that are going to get all excited about reading a new book by a cool author...and wind up with this lumbering, cringe-worthy tale.

This book is going to surprise a LOT of people...and not in a good way. Pass it by if you loved The Lovely Bones. I don't want you to sully the experience of reading that book by reading this one, knowing that somehow they came out of the same mind.

* Susie Salmon is the main character in The Lovely Bones, the one with whom the female teen population is almost universally enamored. ( )

Dark book, about mental illness and family relationships - a woman who smothers her mother with a pillow and the next 24 hours of life, reflecting back on events that led to her fateful decision. ( )

Loved it! Helped me accept the colliding emotions I went through during my mother's last months, and the role I had to play. ( )

The book starts out with a bang, and I won't say what that bang is because it would spoil it for others. This is the story of Helen Knightly and the decisions she makes in a 24-hour period after the "bang" at the beginning of the book. I despised Helen for the first half of the book, not necessarily for what she did at the beginning, which was almost understandable, but for some of the things she did after that. But then as her past unfolds, I began to sympathize with Helen and understand a lot of the choices she had made in her life and her more recent actions. The second half of the book is riveting. Very dark but mostly realistic book. ( )

Gruesome, morbid, gave me weird dreams

This is a story about mental illness and its victims. Helen Knightly smothers her elderly mother with a pillow in an impetuous moment after being unable to figure out how to go about cleaning her mother who has just soiled herself. The story obviously goes much deeper. Helen is the product of two less-than-stable individuals. Helen's mother, Clair, suffered from a severe case of agoraphobia throughout her adult life. After an incident where a neighborhood boy is killed by a hit-and-run driver, Clair (although not the driver) is demonized by the townsfolk for not comforting the boy in his dying moments. It comes to a head when a group of neighbors shows up to confront Clair and instead, Helen literally takes a punch for her mother, who is cowering inside the house. From there, it goes from bad to worse when Helen's father finally succeeds in committing suicide by shooting himself in the head in front of his wife. After reading all of this, the reader is feeling quite sympathetic towards poor Helen. After all, what chance did she have growing up in THAT household?? I think the author did an admirable job of making the reader really care about the protagonist and her dilemma. Unfortunately, I would have preferred a more definitive ending. Ultimately, it is left up to the reader to decide what happens to Helen and everyone in her life. ( )