Book #57 week #41, The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

After reading The Lovely Bones I was looking forward to reading something else by Alice Sebold. I had no clue what The Almost Moon was about (seems to be a running theme with me) when I dove into it. I should really stop doing that! At first I thought the book would be painful, forty-nine year old Helen kills her eighty-eight year old dementia stricken mother right off the bat. My own mother passed away this May at fifty-nine and she had slight dementia. But over all this book was just blah.

Helen kills her mother without an explanation as to why. Then in the period of 24 hours she; sleeps with her best friend's adult son, calls her ex-husband to confess about the killing, goes to work (as a live nude model), is questioned by the police, picks up her youngest daughter at the airport, leaves her at a bar when she finds out the police are searching her house,  calls the friend's son to pick her up, sleeps with him again, convinces him to loan her a car, steals his gun and ends up at the recently empty house near her mother's house and plans to kill herself. However she decides she cannot go through with it because her own father committed suicide and she didn't want to put her daughters through that on top of everything that has happened. That is pretty much the main plot in a nutshell. The in between moments are where we learn of Helen's past. Both of her parents had some sort of mental illness that screwed her up pretty well. In the end I feel Helen killed her mother to save her from having to live in a convalescent home because she was extremely agoraphobic and leaving her home would have been very difficult for her.

Honestly though I just didn't care. I looked up the reviews of The Almost Moon on goodreads.com after the fact and they were not good! I didn't feel disturbed like a lot of the commentators did but even though the writing was good, some of the characters were amusing and the history was interesting something was seriously lacking for me. I couldn't feel for Helen or her mother. I was hoping their history lesson would change that but it didn't.

I can't say I loved or even liked this book but I can't say I hated it either. It had a lot of potential however when I finished the book I really felt nothing at all. It did not stay with me in either a positive or negative way.

Quote:
“To take the tops off all the houses and mingle our miseries was too simple a solution, I knew. Houses had windows with shades. Yards had gates and fences. There were carefully planned out sidewalks and roads, and these were the paths that, if you chose to go into someone else's reality, you had to be willing to walk. There were no shortcuts.”

Book #21 Week #19, The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

In The Lovely Bones we follow the aftermath of the brutal murder of fourteen year old Susie Salmon on a cold December night. Her untimely death happens right off the bat in the first few pages of the book. Then we are introduced to her family: mother and father, sister who is a year younger and a much younger brother too young to understand fully what has happened. Oh and a cooky grandmother.

The Lovely Bones was made into a movie and based on the previews of that movie I was lead to believe Susie is trying to get her family to figure out what has happened to her and for justice to be served. The book is sort of like that but not entirely, mostly Susie just cannot move on from her "life" and is watching how her family copes from her version heaven. Even though the subject matter is heavy and my heart broke over and over I liked this book. I found reading from the view point of heaven new and interesting. Also I thought the characters were well developed especially Susie's dad, it was nice to have a warm and caring father figure. Furthermore this is the second book, after last week's The Memory Keeper's Daughter, I've read recently with a detached mother : /

Quote:
“Between a man and a woman there was always one person who was stronger than the other one. That doesn’t mean the weaker one doesn’t love the stronger.”