Having purchased Alice Sebold's 'The Lovely Bones' for a work colleague and it receiving high praise, I decided to purchase 'The Almost Moon' when it cropped up in my local charity shop.
The book is set over a single, twenty four hour period, and starts with Helen Knightly tending her mother. The tension between them is tangible and within a few chapters, Helen Knightly is a murderer.
Sebold handles what is a very personal crime, with great skill. During the book, Helen seems to go from slightly deranged, she has sex with her best friends son (he's an adult), to being childlike, she confides in her ex husband that she's killed her mother, and everything in between, like going to work, which happens to be life modelling.
This is a short book, and an odd one too. The subject of matricide is one that I hadn't come across before, but an interesting one all the same; and as you read further, a history of agoraphobia and other mental illness's in the family are revealed. So, reasons for Helen's instability become apparent, and the author could easily have tried to justify the murder this way, but she doesn't, she just uses the past to explaining why Helen might have murdered her mother.
So, a good little book then. Three and a half stars, but not four, so I'll settle on three.
Now all I have to do is borrow 'The Lovely Bones', which I saw on film but haven't read yet.
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