The Almost Moon, by Alice Sebold

After reading Lovely Bones and Lucky, I was excited to read Almost Moon. My excitement didn’t last very long. Almost Moon is the tale of Helen Knightly, a divorced mother of two grown daughters. Her father having decades earlier, it is up to Helen to take care of her emotionally abusive agoraphobic mother. Throughout the book the reader flashes back to episodes portraying the strained relationship she had with her mother. The first several chapters of the book were engaging. Helen can no longer take the strain and frustration of dealing with her mother, so she smothers her with a kitchen towel. The reader is then lead through Helen’s ritual of stripping and bathing her mother, then pulling her down the basement steps and putting her in the oversized freezer. A little out there, yes, but completely plausible. The remainder of the book goes downhill quickly and I completely lost interest. Almost Moon might be a good book for those readers that haven’t read any of Sebold’s other work, and therefore have nothing to compare it to. But a diehard Sebold fan will definitely be disappointed with this one, as I was.