The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold
The Almost Moon
by Alice Sebold
(Audio)
I am slowly coming to realize that maybe this kind of literary fiction really isn't my thing. I have a hard time looking past things like a disturbing plot and crazy characters to things like overall truths and honest emotions.
At the beginning of this novel, the main character is a caretaker of her elderly mother, who clearly had a lot of mental problems of her own and was not a very nice woman either. Unable to physically get her mother to a spot to be cleaned off after her mother has an accident, the main character promptly and suddenly smothers her mother to death.
The rest of the book is a dance around who the main character is. Seamlessly working memories into the narrative, the book manages to take a 24-hour (roughly) period and make it last a freakin long time. The main character goes off on tangents so suddenly you barely realize it's happening. They're beautiful and the stories of the past define her even more than this sudden and horrific action at the beginning of the book. But I just don't like reading books where there really aren't any characters to love. I felt sorry for EVERYBODY--her, her mother, her father, her ex-husband, her friend, her friend's son, her daughters, even her mother's neighbors. Everyone gets tangled up in this narrative, influenced by this crazy, terribleness that is her family.
The ending was inevitable but not surprising or satisfying to me. I feel like the inner journey I was supposed to be going on never reached that epiphany it was striving for and I certainly didn't come out of it learning more about myself... apart from the fact that I don't ever want to find myself in a situation like that. It's a dark subject that is written about well, but I didn't enjoy a single second of it, I'm afraid. And I like books where I can find something to enjoy--even if it's just enjoying something I've learned about myself in the end.
I've been wanting to read The Lovely Bones by the same author, but now I'm not so sure...