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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
Always Interesting Subject Matter, Nov 29 2008
The Almost Moon is the second book I've read by Alice Sebold (the other being The Lovely Bones). This book was a bit like watching a train wreck - you couldn't really believe what was happening but you couldn't look away. The main character is not terribly sympathetic - we meet her right after she has killed her elderly mother - but we can all recognize the humanity in her. Sebold is clearly a writer in a different category from most. She tackles the most unusual story lines and holds the reader for the entire novel. While I enjoyed The Lovely Bones more, if enjoy is the right word to use with Sebold's novel topics, I still found this book to be a very good read.
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A Puzzling Story but Don't Be So Quick To Judge, May 5 2008
Other reviewers are slamming this book because, I suspect, they don't understand the protagonist or her actions. While I don't claim to understand the protagonist's actions either, I can relate to her character. I know about living your entire life trying to be what others want you to be, in the mistaken belief and hope that if you could just be 'right enough' or 'good enough', it might stop your mentally ill (or alcoholic or abusive) mother (or father or other caregiver) from acting the way they do.
I couldn't reject the story outright, because so much of it had relevance for me. I know about doing the wrong things, about not being able to reach out to someone with a hug or encouraging words because that kind of behavior is alien. And even knowing how normal people are supposed to behave isn't always enough to teach an 'abnormal' person how to behave. Knowledge and experience are so different and experience always counts most.
There were times when, as I read the story, I wondered if Ms. Sebold had proposed this objective for the novel: to write about someone who makes all the wrong choices, regardless of her intent. Most readers are voting that such a person can't exist. But I agree that truth is stranger than fiction and such a person probably does exist somewhere. You might not want to ever meet her. But she's out there.
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Don't bother, Jan 20 2008
I also was highly dissappointed, I am just trying to finish it to justify the purchase, ugh, I hate wasting money on bad reads!
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meh., Jan 8 2008
I loved reading The Lovely Bones and Lucky. Both books were amazing. However, I was taken back when I began to read the almost moon. It is well written, but no where close to her others books. It was a bit of a disappointment.
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"Lucky" indeed, Dec 17 2007
Like most people who were enchanted by Seabolds first novel "the lovely bones" I was very excited to finally sit down and turn to the first page of this, her second work of fiction. Twenty pages later and I know that if it wasn't for her earlier book I would have stopped reading this awful tripe a few pages earlier. It is not a good story, nor well written and there are no characters who we care about in the slightest. I did indeed finish the book but grudgingly and it did not get any better, if fact probably worse. Whether Alice Seabold will write anything worthy again is in the lap of the gods, but I think any subsequent work of hers will always include "by the author of "the lovely bones" on the dust jacket and I will bet my last dollar that no future book by hers will ever be published that claims "by the author of "the almost moon".
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excellent book, Dec 12 2007
Hard to read, but well written. Should she have killed her mother? No. Did she love her mother? Yes. Did she hate her mother? Yes. It's complicated and the lay of the land is rough - the land between mothers and daughters. I think Alice Sebold did an excellent job dealing with this territory and that of mental illness.
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Yikes. Sophmore Album Syndrome methinks., Oct 21 2007
Okay, I just finished reading this the other day. I was really exited about this book coming out due to my love of her book "The Lovely Bones".
So imagine my surprise when I was about halfway through this new book, and I not only HATED the protagonist, but this story is messed right up. This woman Helen takes care of her crazy 88 year old mother who has dementia and cancer, who raised her but did not love her at all. Helen's father killed himself due to how bad a mother and wife the mother Clair was....ect. Well, in the first chapter Helen kills her mother by smothering her, and throws her in a freezer and runs off and sleeps with her best friends son. Then Sebold spends the rest of the novel toggling back and forth from present to past (incoherently mind you) trying to explain WHY Helen would have reason to do this. We don't end up finding out ANYTHING important, nor do we discover any motive behind various things that Helen does throughout. The writing is poor at best, and she would literally begin a sentence talking about the past, and then somehow end it in the present. So you have whole paragraphs where the narrative jumps around and it's like being inside the thoughts of a lunatic who can't decide where they are or what the heck they are talking about.
So, I hate the protagonist (and Sebold didn't even attempt to make her an anti-hero...she's just a messed up woman who commits murder and then tries to justify it), and the book can't hold MY attention let alone its own. Bad, bad, bad. Just atrocious. Don't read it.
This got me thinking. I have now picked up 3 (including The Almost Moon) books in a row that have been this whole new style of contemporary fiction that have at their heart a style of writing that I find, on the whole, just entirely pretentious. Just tell the story! I am SO sick and tired of reading the thoughts of people who think they are witty, and charming, when in actuality they are jerks. People complain that, let's say for example thriller writers, are a low form of author. They don't exactly require you to have to take notes and re-read sentences. They are just telling you a story right? So what if they don't tell it in a flowery over-descriptive way. Why does that mean that so-called airport-thriller writers have to be considered sub-par? Now, this doesn't mean that all books should be this way, but I find there is a balance in between the pretentious and the simpler writing. Those that find THAT style are golden, in my humble opinion. Some examples are Diane Setterfields "The Thirteenth Tale", Kim Edwards "The Memory Keeper's Daughter", Jonathan Franzen's "The Corrections" or "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time" by Mark Haddon. This last being written by someone who's POV protagonist is autistic, and that protagonist is easy to understand even though he is not your average narrator. The mark of good writing. Don't sacrifice the story you are telling for the need to be over-descriptive, or stylistic.
Since I hate ending nasty reviews on a bad note....I'll mention some GOOD reads I've had recently.
"Water For Elephants" by Sara Gruen.
Orphaned and penniless at the height of the Depression, Jacob Jankowski escapes everything he knows by jumping on a passing trainand inadvertently runs away with the circus. So begins Water for Elephants, Sara Gruens darkly beautiful tale about the characters who inhabit the less-than-greatest show on earth. This book was a book I could not put down, it is VERY well-written, jumping between Jacob as a 90-year old man in an old age home, and him as a youth during the depression. Read it!
...and I am currently reading and absolutely LOVING...
"Special Topics In Calamity Physics" by Marisha Pessl.
Blue Van Meer writes of the year her life "unstitched like a snagged sweater." This first novel is a hybrid, part coming-of-age story, part murder mystery. But first and foremost, it's a dazzling prose circus, full of hilarious metaphors and studded with footnotes, some real, many invented. Just fantastic stuff, and it is doing a good job of getting the bad taste of the Sebold book from my mouth!!
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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
I disagree!, Mar 7 2008
Lovely Bones was a great story, but the quality of the writing was poor at best, as is often the case with a first novel.
Here, in The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold's writing is great, although the disturbing subject matter is not for the fainthearted. I disagree with the previous reviewers and with Publisher's Weekly. The whole point about the protagonist jumping around from past to present and back in the same sentence IS that's she's slightly nutty, as one would have to be to kill one's own mother. Do you not think all killers attempt to normalise their behaviour? Just as many who grow up in dysfunctional families do not realise that there is anything strange going on....
I found this book unputdownable.
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