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Loading... The Almost Moonby Alice Sebold
Work InformationThe Almost Moon by Alice Sebold
  
No current Talk conversations about this book.  LyndaWolters1 | Apr 3, 2024 |   thatnerd | Mar 2, 2024 | eboods | Feb 28, 2024 |  ) ellink | Jan 22, 2024 |  ) LynnB | Sep 10, 2023 |
 If you welcome the unreal disjunction between killing your mother and reflecting afterward how lucky you are compared with the children of the dead, “uncared for” mothers in Rwanda and Afghanistan, then this book will make you clap your hands with joy. If you find the idea that mothers shape their children’s “whole” lives original rather than simultaneously banal and puerilely overstated, then Barnes & Noble, here you come! This novel is so morally, emotionally and intellectually incoherent that it’s bound to become a best seller. ...in The Lovely Bones the victim is young and innocent and the killer serial; in The Almost Moon the victim is old and hurtful, the killer barely a murderer at all. There's a similar alertness to the ways in which everyone's a victim and everyone has murderous feelings, and outlandish acts again come out of a need to love and feel loved.... The excess of craziness means we don't have, paradoxically, an intimate sense of what Helen is like: she's sardonic, practical, controlled - but then none of those things, just her crazy parents' daughter. Sebold has an Olympic pole-vaulter’s instinct for going over the top; occasionally my eyes were rolling so hard I had to hold the book directly over my head to keep reading... Part of The Almost Moon’s diminished power might be that, since (and partly because of) the wild success of The Lovely Bones, this genre—the American suburban gothic family dysfunction saga—has become even more of a tired pop-cultural reflex than it was before. Sebold reveals the family's fractured past (insane, agoraphobic mother; tormented father, dead by suicide) and creates a portrait of Clair that resembles Sebold's own mother as portrayed in her memoir, Lucky . While Helen has clearly suffered at her mother's hands, the matricide is woefully contrived, and Helen's handling of the body and her subsequent actions seem almost slapstick. Sebold can write, that's clear, but her sophomore effort is not in line with her talent. AwardsDistinctions
Having set aside her own life in her support of her parents, husband, and children, Helen Knightly confronts the realities of the choices that were imposed upon her during a harrowing twenty-four-hour period of death and revelation. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage: (2.79)
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Wikipedia in English (2)
16
So, what about The Almost Moon was such a turn off? The style of writing and the bunny trails that led to who-knows-where until I caught myself writing my grocery list while reading.
The book is dark, twisted, and really strikes a chord into the realm of while we may secretly wish at times our infirmed, demented mother were dead; we aren’t actually going to kill them. Even that was okay with me reading - this is fiction, after all, and Misery (Steven King), was SO good, yet who in their right mind would hobble some poor soul whose car crashed in the woods just so they wouldn’t leave us? But we all loved it. So, why not The Almost Moon? The writing.
Alice Sebold has obvious talent, real talent, talent I wish I had as a writer, but what in the world was this book? Some sheafs of paper should stay a paperweight.
I’m giving this story a 2/5. As for the author, I will try Alice Sebold’s other book at some point down the long road. (