Almost Moon (Sebold)

Book Reviews
It is indisputably a good thing when writing is so vivid it causes physical reactions.... [Sebold’s] willingness to pry into the darker aspects of human consciousness is what's important.
Los Angeles Times


It's a strange, wild, even hysterical book: visceral, black and unguarded, and there were moments when I wondered if Sebold had gone too far. But my God, it grips....I lay awake half the night, feverishly hoping both that it would never end, and that it would all be over soon.
London Evening Standard 


Advance notices of The Almost Moon have tended to carry a caveat, suggesting that Sebold's topic is too unrelentingly grim to promise the sort of reception that The Lovely Bones warranted. For my money it's a better novel. It's brilliantly paced, it's brutally honest, and the Gordian knot at its core—an abusive mother and her traumatically attached daughter—is depicted with such generous intelligence that the fineness of the novel more than surpasses its own horror show of circumstance.
Boston Globe


The Almost Moon has intensity and a page-turning quality. Readers of this book are likely to be discussing it for a long time.”
Seattle Times


A dark, masterful contrast to her essentially sunny crowd-pleaser, The Lovely Bones.... The material is risky and exciting and refreshingly new. Whether readers sympathize with poor Helen or not, all but the squeamish will fall in and follow her to the end.
Chicago Sun-Times


Sebold's unblinking authorial gaze is her hallmark: where lesser writers would turn away from things too horrible to see or feel or admit, her scrutiny never wavers.
Lev Grossman - Time


Sebold's disappointing second novel (after much-lauded The Lovely Bones) opens with the narrator's statement that she has killed her mother. Helen Knightly, herself the mother of two daughters and an art class model old enough to be the mother of the students who sketch her nude figure, is the dutiful but resentful caretaker for her senile 88-year-old mother, Clair. One day, traumatized by the stink of Clair's voided bowels and determined to bathe her, Helen succumbs to a life-long dream and smothers Clair, who had sucked the life out of [Helen] day by day, year by year. After dragging Clair's corpse into the cellar and phoning her ex-husband to confess her crime, Helen has sex with her best friend's 30-year-old blond-god doofus son. Jumping between past and present, 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.
Publishers Weekly


Sebold strikes two notes: grim and grimmer.... The result is an emotionally raw novel that is, at times, almost too painful to read, yet Sebold stays remarkably true to her vision...[and] brings ... such honesty and empathy that many will find their own dark impulses reflected here; however, it is so unremittingly bleak that it seems unlikely that it will be greeted with the same enthusiasm as her debut. —Joanne Wilkinson
Booklist


(Audio version.) Much has been made of Sebold's opening line to her new novel, but it immediately sets the listener up for a roller-coaster journey into ethics and family relationships that may seem too familiar to some and too discomforting to others. Helen Knightly's climactic decision opens the book, but her history with her mother, Clair, and her deceased father are brutally explored through the skillful weaving of memories and haunted immediacy. Almost Moon is very different from The Lovely Bones, and yet the strength of the author's sense of danger told rather matter-of-factly is highly compelling. Joan Allen's reading is almost hypnotic. Highly recommended.
Joyce Kessel - Library Journal