What do You think about 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
