Philosophy and the Meaning of Life - What's It All About?

I was genuinely captivated by this book. While reading this, I could see through the eyes and perspective of the writer... if you have not lived this life... it can be hard to understand it from the main characters perspective.

This story so truly and brutally captured the truth of a childhood with one or both mentally ill parents. I can't even begin to express how spot on the conflicting emotions and fine lines there are between love and hate. The inner turmoil the main character is struggling with is something that can only be understood through the eyes of a survivor of such.

Granted, killing your mother is certainly not,"the right thing to do." That being said, this is "fiction"- stories of make believe where we allow our imagination to run wild with those real momentary temptations that come pass into our minds momentarily... but instead of letting them pass by we act on them without restraint. I immediately connected with the story line and main character finding the writing to be both brilliant and heart breaking. I completed this story in two days unable to stop reading.

One of my favorite (of many) from this would be, "It was a bitter truth- my discovery- that daughters were not made in cookie-cutter patterns from the genes of their mothers alone. Random accidents of ancestry could blunt a nose or tip a forehead until beauty's delicate tracery gave way to an ordinary Jane."

The whole premise of this novel is just wrong wrong wrong. It feels as though the author is trying to convince the reader that the main character is somehow justified in murdering her elderly mother. I was never convinced, okay? What is so disturbing is the fact that the mother is mentally ill. Somehow the author wants us to forgive the murderer because she was "abused" by this bad mother - cold, unfeeling, self-absorbed. But honestly, the fact that she yawned loudly when her daughter told her she was pregnant was not quite enough to warrant smothering the old lady! Helen says she was "done" looking after Mom but she didn't live with her or even manage most of her needs. There was a host of wonderfully philanthropic people who visited DAILY to deliver food and complete chores. Helen should have thanked her lucky stars! I began to feel really sorry for this mentally ill, agoraphobic whose own child imagined murdering her from a young age. Okay, cancel that. They were both mentally ill including suicidal dad. Sad all around. p.s. I agree with the other reviewers who are extremely put off by the vivid and disturbing descriptions of body parts and odors. Ew.

“When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.”
How’s that for an opening line? Helen’s mother needed killing, and Helen was just the person to do it. Except she wasn’t.
Sebold’s second novel, The Almost Moon, is the story of fifty-two-year-old Helen, whose father committed suicide when she was a teenager, and her spontaneous act of mercy/revenge on her eighty-year-old mother and the chaos that follows. Helen’s ex-husband, her two adult daughters, her best friend since childhood, and her best friend’s adult son are all affected by, and drawn into, the chaos.
Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, was universally praised. The average rating on Goodreads, with 1,655,999 ratings is currently 3.7. Most of the ratings and reviews are high. But when looking through the ratings for The Almost Moon, which has an average of 2.67, with about 32,000 ratings so far, what jumps out is the incredible disparity of opinions. There seem to be about as many 1 and 2 star ratings as 4 and 5 star. Many of the people at the bottom of the ratings loved The Lovely Bones, but were disappointed, angered, revolted by The Almost Moon. The reasons varied. Some could not stomach the basic premise of killing your mother. Many could never sympathize with the protagonist, Helen.
I come down on the higher end of the ratings, largely because I was amazed by what Sebold did with narrative time. The real narrative time of the story is twenty-four hours. Everything “happens” in that short time. But the experiential time for the reader is Helen’s entire lifetime. The narrative is in first person, from Helen’s point of view, and Sebold moves Helen’s consciousness through time flawlessly, weaving past and present into, dare I say it, a crazy quilt. I found the characters, both past and present, believable and sympathetic and powerfully motivated. As Helen gradually teases out the truth about her father and mother, and about her own marriage and family, the reader as gradually begins to understand that opening sentence of the novel.
I do confess that the novel was slow engaging me, even after the surprising opening line and chapter. That opening line promised more than the next sixty or seventy pages delivered. I usually give a novel fifty pages to get its hooks in me. If I’m not hooked by then, I set it aside. I stayed with The Almost Moon beyond that point because of Alice Sebold’s beautiful prose. Very early the narrator says, “As darkness descended, so did the cold. I looked down at the length of my mother’s body, wrapped in double blankets, and knew she would never feel the uncertainties that come with the fluctuation of air or light again. ‘Over now,’ I said to her. ‘It’s over.’”
So I stayed with Helen a little longer, and it wasn’t too long before I was glad I did. This novel isn’t for everyone, as the wide-ranging ratings indicate, but if you’re a fan of literary fiction, I’d recommend giving it a try.

I love Alice Sebold’s writing—the specificity, the unexpected detail that pops up under the narrator’s close scrutiny—this book has them both. And I have to say that starting a book out with matricide is a real grabber. But things begin to go off the rails pretty quickly. Why, for instance, doesn’t the narrator, Helen, call 911 immediately after dragging her mother to the back porch steps and suffocating her with towels? Why must she drag the dead woman back into the kitchen, cut off her clothes, clean up the “accident” her mother had earlier sitting in her chair (after all, doesn’t a person’s bowels release upon death?), and then drag her downstairs to the basement? True, Helen gives reasons for these things, but they don’t make sense. Helen goes on to immediately call her ex-husband—who lives at least seven states away—for help and then sleeps with her best friend’s 30-year-old son—twice. By the time the whole family reunites, I’ve given up making sense of the story.

Perhaps this is intentional on Sebold’s part. After all, Helen’s mother is described as insane or mentally ill by several people, and her father also had been institutionalized and eventually commits suicide, which leads to Helen taking over the demented mother’s care. Finally, near the end of the book, Helen expresses worry over mental illness running in the family. So perhaps Helen herself is a bit balmy, but if that is the case, it’s not made clear to the reader. Instead, it holds the same difficulty as writing from the point of view of a boring person: how does a boring narrator NOT tell a boring story? Or in this case, NOT tell a story that doesn’t make sense? If Sebold has found a way to do it, this book shows little evidence of it. Helen simply comes off as much too reliable a narrator. And as a Village Voice reviewer points out, “The book is emotionally false... it is implausible that people would react to the murder as they do.” So very true.

from reasonandmeaning.com

Julian Baggini is a British philosopher, author of several books about philosophy written for a general audience, and co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Philosophers’ Magazine. He was awarded his PhD in 1996 from University College London. His 2004 book, What’s It All About: Philosophy & The Meaning of Life, conducts a secular and non-hubristic inquiry into the question of the meaning of life. Secular because we cannot know if religion is true, and not hubristic since it does not claim there is some secret answer to the question. Were there such an answer we would probably have discovered it by now. Baggini begins by looking at some of the proposed answers.

Can living life forward give life meaning? Instead of looking into the past why not look to some future goal, like avenging your brother’s death? The problem with this answer is that we can always ask of this future, or any future, why bring it about? And that question leads to the quest for some final end. In short any why/because series can be extended infinitely into either the past or future and never definitively and finally puts an end to our questions. Other problems with looking to the future include: 1) we might die before we reach our goal; 2) even if we are immortal this does not solve our problem since meaning would always be in our future; and 3) if we do reach our goal, then what?

The main problem with a future-oriented life is that it locates meaning in a specific moment in time. This raises an obvious question: shouldn’t we expect some meaning from the present too? It seems then that meaning involves something enduring, something about which no further why questions need be asked, and this something must in some sense exist now. In other words the key to meaning must be found in something that is an end in itself.

Baggini now turns to the notion that gods or an afterlife give life meaning. While believing in a god is no answer to the question of the meaning of life, we could stop worrying and accept that the gods provide meaning. However, this is to give up the search. In this case you don’t know the meaning of life, you just stop asking the question. As for an afterlife, is there such a thing? The evidence suggests there is no afterlife and even if there were what would be the meaning of it? The more important question is whether life can be meaningful without this assumption.

To fully answer our question we need to find a way that life can be meaningful that is not derived from the gods, or the past or the future, but from within. Baggini proceeds to investigate six ways (helping others, serving humanity, being happy, becoming successful, enjoying each day, and freeing your mind) that might provide life with meaning. His concludes that all of them may be part of a good or meaningful life, but they are not all of it. They do not guarantee that our lives are meaningful because, of any of them, we can still ask: is such a life meaningful?

What all this means is that we are threatened with meaninglessness. According to Baggini our choices are to accept that: 1) life is meaningless; 2) the question is meaningless; or 3) meaning is impossible to discover. Regarding 1—while life is not meaningful in an objective sense, it can still be subjectively meaningful. Regarding 2—while life is not the kind of thing that can bear meaning, it cannot bear meaning anymore than sound can bear color, it can have meaning for the person living it. Regarding 3—although we cannot know the meaning of life with certainty, we can still find our lives meaningful by living them. One might say that such a life is not sufficiently examined and thus not worth living, but that is mere intellectual snobbery. Unexamined lives can be worth living if the people living them find them worthwhile. So a life can be subjectively meaningful despite the lack of any objective meaning.

Baggini’s admits “This kind of rationalistic-humanistic approach leaves many unsatisfied.”[i] A fundamental objection to such an approach is that it separates morality from meaning. Can human values really be enough to ground value? In response Baggini says: 1) we might say that certain people have meaningful but immoral lives; or 2) we could say that subjective meaning is a necessary but not sufficient condition for meaningful life—the life must also be moral. As to the charge that this second response is ad hoc, Baggini reminds the reader that life is meaningful only if it is worth living. And this is to recognize that all humans have an equal claim to a good life and to make someone’s life go worse is a moral wrong. Baggini also reminds readers that simply because life has to have value in itself and for the person living it “does not … mean that the only person able to judge the value is the person living the life…”[ii] Individuals may be mistaken about the value of their lives; just because they think they have meaningful lives does not make them so.

Another objection to a humanistic account of meaning says that we should accept and be attuned to the mystery in life and that the rationalistic humanistic account does not do this. Baggini responds that this is merely a plea from those who like mystery. He has not said that there are no gods or that people cannot get meaning from them; he just does not think there are good reasons to believe in the transcendent and he finds his meaning elsewhere. Furthermore, there is plenty of mystery about how to actually have meaningful lives; discovering what is meaningful to us is quite mysterious. Baggini thinks that attunement to the mystery that we are alive at all is a reason to be thankful. In fact this is a more noble kind of mystery than believing in the mystery of a god or afterlife, which Baggini thinks are motivated by fear that without gods we would have to take responsibility for our lives.

The tragedy and fragility of life suggests that love, a topic on which philosophers are notoriously silent, is the answer to the problem of human existence. The desire to do good things is motivated not by reason but by love. What then of love and happiness? They are connected, Baggini asserts, but love is not the same as happiness. Love persists thru unhappiness and its object is the beloved. Love shows the value we place in authenticity since we want to be loved for who we are. Love provides insight into true success, the kind that makes life meaningful. Love requires us to seize the day; otherwise we might let it pass us by. Love shows that we can have meaningful lives without philosophy, without a careful examination of our lives.

Philosophy is not good at examining love or the non-rational components of human life which reveals the limits of philosophical insight. In the end love is not motivated by reason. The rational-humanistic approach is not misguided however; rather, it shows the limits of our ability to understand life. And it also shows loves’ limits, mortality and fragility. “Sadly, it is not true that all you need is love. Love, like life, is valuable, but fragile and subject to no guarantees. It is fraught with risk and disappointment, as well as being the source of great elation and joy.”[iii] In the end the humanist accepts that morality, mystery, meaning, and love exist without transcendental support. This is a sign of one’s ability to confront and accept the limits of life. “The transcendentalist’s desire for something more is understandable, but the humanist’s refusal to succumb is, I believe, a sign of her ability to confront and accept the limits of human understanding and , ultimately, human existence.”[iv]

Baggini concludes his deflationary account of meaning by saying that the meaning of life is available to all, not only to the guardians who claim a monopoly on it. His view thus challenges the power of those who would control us, and gives us the responsibility of determining meaning for ourselves. But knowing about the meaning of life does not provide a recipe for living it. It is hard to live meaningfully, it is an ongoing project, and one is never finished with the task. Baggini concedes that his is not the last word on the subject, that we need more than philosophers to work our problem out, and that no book is ever the final word on the subject. Also people are different so we cannot offer an instruction manual for all—only suggest a framework within which persons might live meaningfully.

In the end the meaning of life is not that mysterious, it is something within our grasp, and we can live meaningfully. Hope rather than despair is called for, since there are many ways to live meaningful lives. We can recognize all the good and bad things in life and still see that there are lots of ways to live meaningful lives. “We can see the value of happiness … We can learn to appreciate the pleasures of life … We can see the value of success … We can see the value of seizing the day … We can appreciate the value in helping others lead meaningful lives … And finally, we can recognize the value of love, as perhaps the most powerful motivator to do anything at all.”[v]

[i] Julian Baggini, What’s It All About: Philosophy & The Meaning of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 174.

[ii] Baggini, What’s It All About: Philosophy & The Meaning of Life, 177-78.

[iii] Baggini, What’s It All About: Philosophy & The Meaning of Life, 184.

[iv] Baggini, What’s It All About: Philosophy & The Meaning of Life, 184.

[v] Baggini, What’s It All About: Philosophy & The Meaning of Life, 188.

I struggled mightily with this one, but ultimately considered it worth my time, if only because it's unblinking about the unspeakable emotions adult children may have about their aging parents -- especially bad parents -- and it also explores mental illness in an interesting way. I'm particularly interested in how the parent who seems the most ill isn't necessarily the only one who is damaged and doing harm. We all construct our little narratives about who is the hero and who is the villain. We also all hate to admit when WE are the villain, and the heroine of this book is forced to wrestle with that. In fact, this book makes you question this about just about everybody in it, right up until the last page. (That fire on the neighbor's stove struck me as very much like something the heroine's mother would do.)

This is not light beach reading. It's supremely off-putting in many ways. First of all, there's the crime it opens with, which will horrify most readers (after watching my mother struggling with HER mother I had a lot of patience for it). Then there's the weird sexual relationship with the son of a best friend -- contrasted with the ex's sexual relationship, it makes a valid feminist point, but it's still hard to do anything but wince over it. Because of the way it's constructed, the pace sags a bit in the middle. My greatest irritation with the book, though, is that the edgy dialogue sometimes left me wondering who the hell was speaking. I must have read a couple of scenes five times, trying and failing to figure it out. I can only see this as a flaw of editing or of characterization.

Like many others, I thoroughly enjoyed Sebold's other two books, and would recommend them to anyone. This one, I'd say, is only for someone who really wants to chew on a book, and is willing to view it as an interesting step in an author's career. From a commercial point of view, it's probably a misstep. As a challenge to what often goes unspoken, though, I think it's very brave.

I'm not opposed to ambiguous, European-style endings, nor first-person narrative, but when the first person-narrative is told from the perspective of a character whose "self" is not much more than reactive emptiness, it makes for a too-flippant telling of what could have been a brilliant and quietly horrifying plotline. There's a reason that people with personality disorders make the rest of us squirm--it's because, when you dig below the surface; there's nothing there--nobody's home, no will to power outside of their attemts to control things beyond their control.

I guess Sebold did a good job of describing how a "real" person with Dependent Personality Disorder reacts. Trouble is, it doesn't translate well into any literary genre outside performance art or Abnormal Psych textbooks or YouTube videos warnings of how to identify and avoid such people. I'd like to have seen Sebold flesh out the story from the perspective of the other, less empty, characters in the story. Perhaps that wasn't possible in a 24 hour time frame--a time frame which I didn't mind at all.

And, whileI appreciate that the ending was ambiguous, this ending was more of a disappointment than it was fodder for thought. I've seen enough foreign films now to know that sometimes, an ambiguous ending tends to help the story stay with you longer, because you are always trying to finish the story. This story, however, just left me colder than it should have left me.

I have read Almost Moon twice. When it first came out, I would not have thought that possible. At the first reading, I could understand the dark humor, such as an off hand remark made at an inopportune moment. I thought at the first chapter, I would be hearing a completely different book than the one written. As the next chapters unfolded, the book became almost too much to take in. They were a burden, heaping one terrible incident on top of another. There was no one bright point to hold onto, to smile in recognition in feeling, no character to champion. I felt the weights being added, one by one, unto my own shoulders as I continued to the end. And yet, I did continue to read. I was taking it in and feeling it and that is what a book, a story, should do for the reader.

I read it again last week, though, and knowing what was coming, and also, I believe, being ready to see beyond what I thought the book would be about and to just let the words tell the story, I was able to understand what I had missed on that first reading. Almost Moon is an illustration in mental illness and how individuals, various personalities, react to the fact of a life that does not measure up to what a life 'should' be. Every step from childhood leads to the daughter becoming the adult she became. The reader is left wondering at what time, and exactly how, that might have changed. Was the pit of insanity always her future, as it had been her mother's? As she took each new step down the ladder into that pit, was there any way she could have changed herself? Did she even know she should try to be someone other than who she was? As the mother's, the father's, and the daughter's lives open up to us...slowly and only when the author is ready for us to learn them, we hear how 'normal' the neighbors are. They are the other half of living, a sign that not all the world is insane. The ending, perhaps, is telling us that normal can be overrated, and that each of us has our own life to construct or destruct, and waiting for what comes next is better than the alternative.

According to Jean-Paul Sartre: ''Purpose and meaning are not built in to human life, we ourselves are responsible for fashioning our own purposes. It is not that life has no meaning, but that it has no predetermined meaning.''

Which to many might ring a bit hollow: ''Ok, we can't see any meaning out there, so we are just going to make one up for ourselves....'' Really, is a made-up meaning a real meaning at all?

Yes, according to Baggini, assigned purposes are not inferior to predetermined purposes! He thinks that we should ''grow up'' and accept that there is not some hidden or secret purpose that we have not yet discovered.
Instead, our decision making should be based on what is out in the open for everyone to see: ''The whole problem of lifes meaning is not that we lack any particular piece of secret information ... It is rather to be solved by thinking about the issues on which the evidence remains silent....''

So what could life's purpose then be? Some might claim that life is all about having a good material standard of living or becoming successful someday in the future. Others claim that life is about helping others, serving humanity, being happy, enjoying each day or freeing the mind. According to Baggini there might be some truth in these answers - but not the whole truth.
The rest of the book (an entertaining and thought provoking journey) walks us through some of these ideas that people have (on lifes purpose). Trying not to be dogmatic, he doesn't reject anything completely, but does point out weak spots in a lot of the reasoning. In the end the reader should decide for himself, as long as he makes a ''Moral'' and ''Ethical'' choice....

In the end the reader should not think that he will really ever be any wiser. Indeed, we might end up wanting more knowledge and more input.
But Baggini doesn't think it will change much. Instead we should ''confront and accept the limits of human understanding'' - Thats the mature approach according to Baggini. And with that Baggini closes the book.

At least this reader isn't completely satisfied with this....
Well, well - maybe we don't know anything, and maybe we are really reptiles from Tau Ceti inside some virtual reality gear that makes us think that we are earthlings - Then surely the Buddhist are wise to state that reality is a fuzzy thing, and that we should keep working to improve our minds - maybe there might even be some purpose in that. And surely Baggini will agree that it will be ok for us to decide our own purpose, as long as we don't hurt anyone else in the process.

-Simon

I loved The Lovely Bones and I purchased this book solely on that recommendation alone. I liked this book, but it was not the same type of book and in many ways I had a much harder time with it than the authors debut book.

As the reader, we know from the book jacket that Helen murders her mother - but that fact was still a bit of a surprise to me. I think somehow I thought maybe it was just a metaphor, or somehow Helen was living in a fantasy world to an extent and performed this act there. Because this is a very real event in this book, it made the whole thing very difficult for me from the start.

Helen's relationship with her mother is not a healthy one, with her mother who is both mentally ill and agoraphobic. It's clear that Clair is descending into the last phase of her life, becoming more detached from reality and treating all the people in her life more and more poorly. I found it difficult to tell if this was as a result of her aging, or if she had truly been that nasty her entire life. As we follow Helen through the book, it becomes obvious that Clair wasn't entirely cut out for normal society or raising children, which makes things all the more sad.

I found Helen's actions throughout the book to be more and more confusing, which is probably the point considering it takes quite a bit to murder someone to begin with. The steps she takes over the twenty-four hour period we watch her are just baffling, I can't even describe how it makes me feel. I will say that this book is not for the faint of heart - the subject matter is extremely difficult and there were times I had to set it down to take a break. I liked it, but I also can't see myself reading it again because it was just so hard for me to read.

Even the most healthy mother-daughter relationship has times of frustration, and this book takes many of those frustrations to the extreme. It makes me wonder what things are going to be like when my own parents start to decline, and I'm grateful that I have other siblings to share that burden with. One of the tragedies of Helen's life is that she is really alone in taking care of her mother, and she never manages to escape the small town life she so desperately wants to get away from. Her actions during the day we witness further solidify that she will continue to live in some kind of prison for the remainder of her own life - whether that's physical or in the one she creates in her own mind.

This book will likely make you confront ideas and conventions in your own relationships. It highlights what can happen if you manage to cross the line into the unthinkable. And makes you wonder what on earth could be going on to drive people in the directions they go.

Having read Alice Sebold's Lucky and The Lovely Bones, I was determined to read Sebold's third book and second novel, The Almost Moon, and was admittedly looking forward to what I consider her infamous ability to hook the reader. Again, for me, Sebold did not disappoint as the first line begins, "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily" (3).

Through flashbacks, Helen, the protagonist, details her turbulent relationship with her mentally ill mother which ultimately ends in her mother's death. This first-person perspective is not only macabre in nature, but also interestingly matter-of-fact. The honesty with which Sebold represents Helen not only brings her to life, but also creates a sympathetic reader, "I had not been raised to hug or to comfort or to become part of someone else's family. I had been raised to keep a distance" (79). In addition, Sebold's elevated vocabulary choices- bilious, homunculus- challenges the reader (okay, challenges me) making interaction with her words a well-rounded learning experience.

For the purposes of book club, grainy butterscotch fudge, brandy balls, and pecan meringues are a must in order to recall Helen's telling of baking with her mother and to instigate conversation regarding this mother/daughter relationship.

The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold

3 of 5

Helen Knightley has lived with a mother who was absent in mind and cruel in personality all of her life. Knowing her mother's life is coming to an end and this will be the final call Helen does not have the strength. She smothers her mother. In the next twenty-four hours Helen remembers her life with this mother and reevaluates her relationship with those around her.

Plot: Most of the novel is told in flashbacks of Helen's relationship with her mother and father while her relationship with her ex-husband and her children is wildly glossed over. Helen spends the entire novel blaming her mother for her mother's mental illness, for being an awful mother, and for Helen's absolute adoration of her. A bigger issue in this story would be Helen's father, but Helen only remembers him as perfect even when her memories are disturbing.

Characters: Helen wants you to feel sorry for her. People have gone through worse lives and come out stronger. She was entirely an enabler. Her ex-husband, Jake, seemed to have a connection to her that did not carry over through the story. He dropped everything to be at her side but once together the two fell flat. The two have two daughters, Emily and Sarah. Emily is never actually seen in present form in the book, only described in great detail, while Sarah is seen and almost described in less detail. Emily was perfect, Sarah was not, and that seemed to be the main intent to garner from this story. Clair, Helen's mother, was cruel in her old age and dementia, but the woman should have been treated years ago, and certainly after Helen's father died. Everything Helen did made her seem like less and less of a victim.

Easy prose make this novel a quick read. It is easily an in-between book for me. While I enjoyed it I would love to have had more answers to other questions or a deeper look at the years of Helen's life. She spent too much time trying to convince the reader why her mother was awful and less time trying to explain why so many people loved her unconditionally.

Four reasons to read this novel?

4. Despite the dark content, it is an easy read

3. If you liked Sebold's earlier novel, The Lovely Bones, you will appreciate it more

2. The story does do what it intends even while falling flat

1. Even if Helen is a whiner, the story itself is meant to make you wonder why and does just that

Four reasons not to read this novel?

4. No real character development

3. Too much glossing on memories that should have been explored

2. Obvious ending

1. Helen never has a happy moment, even in memory, even when thinking of the daughters she loves

I’ve read Alice Sebold’s memoir, Lucky, and her novel, The Lovely Bones, and while the subject matter was a little difficult to read - I loved them both. Not this book. I couldn’t get past the fifth chapter. The subject was beyond uncomfortable and while the mentally ill mother was horrible, I couldn’t get behind the main character. I couldn’t support any of her actions. I don’t like leaving a book unfinished, but I just can’t possibly read another word.

Bewitching book that makes you think. I loved it. It is a completely engrossing trip and written with enviable talent. Sebold was born to write, and possibly to psychoanalyze as well. The Almost Moon was not what I was expecting, but it was a wonderful story and I'm so glad I grabbed it off the shelf (go ahead, I challenge you to read the first paragraph and no more). The author puts together an intense and enlightening story, but even more impressive is the way she feeds it to the reader, the way she builds characters with texture and depth, and how she sets them loose to build and break down relationships, affect each other, and ultimately teach the reader a little about humanity.

I am sorry for those who didn't "get" Almost Moon as I think they may have tried to pigeon hole the book and got frustrated that it just can't be done. I can see why it might be too dark for some, or that the discomfort of it could turn some readers off, but that is part of the beauty of the book. Alice Sebold has a way of revealing disturbing subject matter in a matter-of-fact tone that is both shocking and, well, not shocking all at the same time. She makes a person question their reaction to what is happening, their traditional ability to judge a character in a book as good or bad, or even "basically good with some flaws", and she leaves the reader asking themselves what exactly is happening and how do I process this? For me, it forces me to see the story from a point of view just outside of my own standard view, and that, my friend, is what unveils this art that Sebold creates out of words. Really, really good stuff.

Helen Knightly takes her clothes off for a living. It's not what you think: she's a respectable mother of two. She is Knightly by name, but it is her day job that sees her modelling in the nude for art college life classes. Her mother, Clair, used to model underwear. It must run in the family. Her husband, Jake, is - or was, perhaps - an artist. They met when she was naked and carried on in the same vein. Now they are divorced, if not exactly estranged. He lives out West in Santa Barbara. He has another relationship, with a woman his daughter's age. Helen tries to mimic. Their daughters are grown up. Helen even has a grandchild.

Helen also, and crucially, still has Clair, the mother who now needs almost total care. One fraught day of many, while Helen and her mother exchange superficially meaningless conversation barbed with a mixture of half-truth, nonsense, accusation and innuendo, the octogenarian Clair fouls herself. She seems not a little proud of her odorous product. It falls to Helen to clean up her helpless and apparently resentful mother. And she snaps. Almost involuntarily a pillow comes to hand and Helen uses it to smother. It's a strange word, smother, what daughters do to mothers.

Helen now has a problem. Thus The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold becomes a first person account of how she copes with and reflects on her act. There is hatred, compassion, opportunism, in fact more motives beneath the surface than you could count. But on the face of things, there is no single identifiable explanation, other than frustration. Jake is summoned to lend a helping hand, but his presence just seems to bring memories of life's unhappiness and disappointment to the fore.

Helen tries to relieve her emotional stress via sex, for the first time in a parked car, seducing a friend's son, apparently for the hell of it, but with Helen there's always at least a hint of motive. She raises her exploit later when it can be used to compete. She recalls her own childhood, her marriage, her children, her parents, life's fulfilling moments, its bad times, its threats.

The Almost Moon reminds me of the work of Anne Tyler, where ostensibly ordinary households and families have their skin peeled back to reveal often surprising, sometimes dark innards. The Almost Moon is similar in its forensic detail of family life. But Alice Seybold's style is always much more threatening, much closer to nightmare tinged with neurosis.

The development of the plot is well handled, with Helen's thoughts never linear, always tending to juxtapose interpreted past, experienced present and imagined future in most instants of her self-analysis. She is a complex person and makes some surprising, even shocking confessions.

The family - every family - is at the bottom of The Almost Moon. Families are full of disparate individuals brought together by an accident of birthright. No wonder they often don't get on. But then birthright is also a bond, but a bond that sometimes can suffocate.

Helen's first person narrative is powerful. In the circumstances the reader begins to wonder how she might be telling such a story, given the detail it unfolds. We get to know the intricacies of her relations with her husband, lover, mother, father, children and even neighbours. In the circumstances, she seems to have plenty of time. In the end, perhaps the reader is still presented with this same dilemma, but there are suddenly several possible solutions. Don't expect to be told what to think, and don't, in The Almost Moon, expect to like the characters, especially Helen Knightly. She certainly would not expect it of you.

I much preferred this book to Lovely Bones - in part because the device of having the dead girl narrate the story from the after life never worked for me.

In the Almost Moon, the main character Helen starts by murdering her mother. And the denouement consists of establishing the motivation that would lead her to do such a thing. And Helen's mother is definitely one of those mother's from hell - always criticizing and guilt-tripping, both her daughter and her husband, always making their needs secondary to her own pathological narcissism.

Yet as Helen grows into adolescence, she becomes fully aware that her mother is mentally ill. And develops a poignant sympathy, profound loyalty and need to protect her mother from vicious neighbors and the mother's own inner demons. It ties Helen to her mother in adulthood, in a way that prevents her from ever leading her own independent life. And as the mother's mental illness gives way to dementia, a woman Helen is incapable of abandoning becomes virtually impossible to communicate with or to care for. And the reader is presented with a fully believable motivation for (impulsive and unpremeditated) murder.

I really enjoyed the character development in this book, which Sebold is very skilled at. Her treatment of the quandry the middle aged face in dealing - in a non-judgemental way - with adult children was a special treat. Especially when we discover our children have value systems we are incapable of sharing or identifying with.

By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall, author of THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY ACT: MEMOIR OF AN AMERICAN REFUGEE

The author of this book has amazing insight into mental illness and the horrors of the lives of some children and otherwise ordinary seeming people. Her use of language is superb in unfolding the story of Helen and her family. It was hard to look away even through the most painful passages. I think some might have liked this book more had the author been Alfred or Allen Sebold. It can be unsettling to know that this book came from the mind of a woman. Had the name of the author been "Stephen King", I suspect readers might have hailed it as a triumph of unmasking horror in everyday life and in the mind of seemingly ordinary people. I thought the book was excellent.

Though this story has an interesting plot, it didn't really really click with me for some reason. I didn't feel connected emotionally to any of the characters. It felt more like a news story to me than a novel. Just didn't seem to have much emotional depth, considering the subject matter.

Not sure at this point if I would give this author another try.

Right from the start, let me say that I understand why so many readers were put off by this book, particularly the violent aspects of the story. It wasn't quite as graphic and disturbing as many of the reviews made it sound, but I see how one would be offended by the story. That being said, if you're not an individual that can objectively read such sensitive subject matter, you should not pick up this book to begin with.
At times, I found myself feeling as most readers have: disgusted with Helen's character and wanting nothing more than to put the book down, but I decided to keep reading. I assumed that as the story went on, an actual background would reveal itself, and it did.

Having come from a very dysfunctional home, I feel that I was able to read this story with a little more understanding. Not that I could ever understand resorting to murder, but I understand how someone's emotional and mental resolve can weaken. This story was not fun, nor entertaining, and it did not draw much sympathy out of me for any of the characters....especially not for the mother. There were some graphic descriptions that put a lump in my throat, which usually doesn't happen to me.

To sum it up, this was a very sad depiction of what mental illness can do to a family, and what emotions and thoughts lie behind many troubled relationships between adult children and their parents. I do applaud Sebold for her willingness to put on paper what others wouldn't dare discuss. It's unfortunate, but I feel that Alice Sebold tapped into subject matter that exists for many, many people but that most would never acknowledge, even to themselves.

Just my two cent but, as for me, I'll not read this book again.

I recently read "The Almost Moon" by Alice Sebold and was impressed. I decided to try out Sebold due to the Peter Jackson movie "The Lovely Bones," which is based off of the book with the same title. Of the two Sebold books read, I really like how she uses the first sentence of the book as a punch in the guts then continues working from that main point.

In "The Almost Moon" the first line in Chapter 1 states, "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." Very quickly the reader is grabbed with this statement and then there is no turning back.

This work of fiction is about a woman named Helen, who takes care of her mother Clair, who suffers dementia. After Helen murders her mother, the remainder of the book is the following 24 hours. Although the style of murder Helen uses is clean and quick, Sebold describes the scene very quickly and grotesquely so that the reader wasn't severely repulsed but deeply shocked.

Although murder is committed, I felt extremely sorry for the victim and the murderess as it seemed that every character in this book were good at heart. Despite the innocence this book insinuates, there is a great deal of hurtful scenes and negative emotions that can easily strike too close to home for some individuals.

The mother Clair, although not a bad person, defiantly never took the responsibility of a mother and when dementia kicked in, her mean streak showed even greater, especially to her daughter. As the book progresses the reader experiences bitter sweet emotions as Helen recalls fond memories and hurtful events regarding her parents. The reader is left feeling sorrow for Helen as it seems like she had never truly made her mother proud, despite her efforts.

In the end I felt that Helen committed a mercy killing without thinking of the consequences. At first, everything seems almost cold hearted, however, as you read on you discover that mother and daughter had formed a very codependent and unhealthy relationship, somewhat like Norman Bates and his mother in Psycho. Although, Helen did have a family and career of her own, she put everything aside to appease her mother, who had never granted her unconditional love.

I believe what Sebold is focusing on in this book is consequences and if an individual is truly happy being dependent or codependent. When the book began, Helen felt liberated as she had granted her mother peace and had finally cut the apron string, however, the reader later learns that although Helen claims killing her mother is easy, the aftermath is devastating. I won't spoil the ending for anyone and although I saw the ending coming a mile away, I was shocked to actually read the conclusion, which is just as big of a gut punch as the first sentence of the book.

Overall, on a scale of 1 to 10 I give this book a 9 1/2. Many people didn't care for this book as they were hoping for another "Lovely Bones". In all honesty, I'm glad to see that Sebold is a woman who isn't scared to jump into untested waters. Due to her style, emotion, and characterization I honestly feel Sebold is the modern female version of Hitchcock or Stephen King.

Disappointing. I only finished the book so that I could review it because I was so frustrated with the story. I guess, in a way, that's a compliment to Sebold---the fact that I cared enough to explain why I didn't care. After no doubt putting her heart and soul into this, I felt she deserved more than a "It was so dark and I hated it" review from me. It always bothers me when people judge a book based on subject matter alone so I wanted to go into detail on why it's not subject matter but something else that makes a story disappoint (well, at least for the fair reader, and I try to be fair). I just wanted to say this because I realize what I am about to say will sound a bit harsh. I do respect Sebold as an author, and so I wanted to explain in depth just why it was I didn't like her latest book.

With that said, here's my full review. I admit this is only my perspective, so take it for what it's worth.

I read this book because I enjoyed The Lovely Bones so much. I was curious. I'd heard bad reviews and yet I thought I should give it a try anyway.

Well, let me just say that it was definitely disappointing. I would probably give the book a 2 or a 2 1/2.

Why didn't I like it? It's not the subject matter that I find most repellent. I just don't think the book is as well written as it could have been. Oh sure, the language is, at times, beautiful, but the narrative structure is questionable, at best. It's essentially 290 pages of the protagonist moving her mother's body and trying to cover her tracks. Oh, yeah, and sleeping with her friend's grown son. But most of the book takes place in the past as Helen reflects on all the little things that have happened over the course of her 49 years. That was one of my main problems with this novel. It's hard to write a novel where the protagonist is remembering this time and remembering that time and have the reader want to follow along, unless you are able to do it in a compelling way. It would help to have a compelling protagonist whom the reader would follow to the brinks of hell, if necessary, and that's what Sebold is really asking the reader to do in this case. I don't think the flashbacks were necessarily confusing, just frustrating. Mainly, they were uninteresting and only served to distract me.
Furthermore, there's no real character I could get invested in. I understand the mother has mental issues, and so I feel for her and her family, but she's pretty much just there, causing trouble for people. As for Helen, I understand she had a very complicated relationship with her mother, but she's just so...I don't know. I don't feel like she cares much about anything---at least she doesn't seem to care about anything.

The grown son whom Helen sleeps with is little more than a cliche. He's got minimal personality. Helen's ex-husband is somewhat interesting, as is the glimpse we are given of Helen's dead father, but neither character is intriguing enough to save this novel.

I assume that Alice Sebold wanted to write about what life is like for those dealing with a mentally ill parent, and I respect her for that. The thing is, a book still needs to be interesting, even when dealing with a storyline about suffocation and madness. The book shouldn't be suffocating and maddening just because the characters are that way to each other. All that does is put the reader in the exact same position the protagonist is in, and seeing as how Helen responded to her frustration by killing her mother, what will the reader want to do with this book that is the source of his/her frustation? Helen probably loves her mother deep down. As a mere reader, I have no such loyalty to this book.

In response to those who say it's the distasteful subject matter that's repellent, I don't agree. Maybe to some it is, but certainly not to everyone who disliked this book.

I can only speak for myself. For me, it's the fact that the story is all over the place, so it's hard to get engaged. That's my personal opinion. And it's the fact that the protagonist just seems to trudge through life, not even trying to get the reader to like her. The protagonist doesn't seem to care if you like her or not. She's just like, "This is the way it is, and if you care, fine. If you don't, well, that's unfortunate for me, but fine." By the end, she seems to be feeling more, but by then, it`s too late for me to care. And then the very ending was just weird.

Oddball quirkiness only goes so far. You need characters who are full of life and full of passion. Well, if not full of passion, at least full of something other than memories. I think you have to be careful, when writing a character like Helen, to not just completely distance the reader from the story.

Anyway, I seem to see Sebold battling with the same problems again and again in her writing. She was able to get away with a scattershot plot in The Lovely Bones because the character's voice was just so vibrant and alive---and the girl was dead! It was pure magic, and, so far, she has not been able to touch upon that magic again. But she is, no doubt, very talented and I wish her the best of luck with anything she writes in the future. I haven't given up on her or anything.

To sum up, I'm not telling anyone not to read this book. That would be a bit arrogant to assume that I know how someone else will feel about it. I rented the book from the library. It really can't hurt to give the book a try. I usually adopt the fifty page rule. In this case, I read the whole book so that I could feel better about reviewing it. But really, I think that fifty pages or so is a fair sampling of what you're in for. So if you really want to, give it a try. Rent it from the library first before you decide whether or not to buy it.

Reviewed by Cherie Fisher for Reader Views (11/07)

I was excited to read the new novel by the acclaimed author of "Lovely Bones," but quickly realized that this was going to be a completely different experience. "The Almost Moon" is a story about a middle-aged woman whose life completely spirals out of control in a very short period of time. While it is very well written, the story itself is so disturbing that I would recommend it only to people who enjoy dark stories. I found myself having a hard time getting through the book at times because I was torn between wanting to smack some sense into the main character and feeling horrified at the things she did.

Helen Knightly is a middle-aged woman who has devoted her life to marriage, children and family. Now divorced with grown children she is frustrated by her mother's frailties. Helen knows that it is time for her mother to go into assisted living and while she is helping her get ready for the move, her mother does not make it to the bathroom in time. Helen completely loses it while trying to clean her mother up and kills her mother. This leads to one bad decision after another. Helen spends the next twenty-four hours doing many irrational things including having sex with her best friend's son.

As she faces the consequences of what she has done and tries to decide what to do about it, Helen also takes a look at her past and the impact that her parents had on her life. As Helen's life spirals she also feels a strange sense of liberation at stepping outside the box of what her life had become.

"The Almost Moon" is definitely for readers who enjoy stories about the mental illness, depravity and weaknesses of the human condition. As a middle-aged divorcee with aging parents I found it way too disturbing to enjoy.

Book received free of charge.

I read the the store Reviews before reading this book, and because of a few interesting reviews...I thought "Why not". Bad mistake. After reading about 25 pages, that was enough for me. However, I read on. Although the book remained dark (which can make very interesting reading) The Almost Moon really isn't very good.

Ms. Sebold is a decent writer up to a point. She made a case for the mother's awful input, she brought in the father's involvement, and made him a likable-though-pathetically sad character but she never made me like Helen, the main character. Helen, an emotionally-damaged person, comes off as slightly quirky, emotionally numb, self-obsessed (which encompassed her mother) and really not very interesting or likable. The wanderings of her mind become mind-numbing and, unfortunately, really dull.

One of the reviews on the store said that the ending was interesting and implied it was open-ended. It seemed to me that the author just quit writing. The Almost Moon wasn't well written enough to appear that Ms. Sebold was leaving the ending up to the reader, just that she maybe became as tired of the character's unraveling as I had.

The first 25 pages are good, enough to compel further reading. Everything after that is really going nowhere. I really wish I'd given this one a miss.

Honestly, I was very disappointed with this book. I thought since I absolutely loved 'the lovely bones' that this would be another amazing read but I was wrong. The story line had the potential to be a good book but it really just fell flat. It was an extremely slow and excruciating read and the flash backs were not seperated well from the here-and-now in the story. The characters left no lasting impact and overall the book was one that would not leave a trace of recognition in my mind. In a few years I may see the spine of this book on the very bottom of my bookshelf and I will have forgotten I've even read it. That's how much of an impact it left on me.

After The Lovely Bones, all things are possible for Alice Sebold. Her imagination is very creative, and she is a good writer. The killing of her mother in the first scene and all the flashbacks are gripping. As Helen slides into insanity, just like her parents, it is hard to put the book down. It may not be excellent literature, but I think it portrays an awful situation truthfully.
One quibble. As she and Emily head out, Helen stops at a store so that Emily can buy a six-pack of beer. In Pennsylvania at the time of the writing this book, one could not buy beer at a store. Only in the past couple of years can one do that in very limited places. Pennsylvania's liquor control laws are medieval, and Alice Sebold didn't do that extra bit of research.
I'm not sure to whom I'll recommend this book. I'll tell friends about it, but it's not one I think is a must-read for everyone.

This was a very interesting novel to read. I think it was by the middle of the first or second page, you got pulled in automatically with one bold statement that she makes. (I won't give away the statement for those who haven't read her book yet.) It's that bold statement that compells you to read the novel to get an understanding about the character, what she went through to get to that point, and to learn how she resolves the conflict. I became a fan of this author after reading her first novel "Lovely Bones." Just like her debut novel, "The Almost Moon" is written intricately with a compelling plot. But, my only issue with this book was its ending--it left me with both the facial and mental expression of "WTF?" It fell short of putting closure to the story--which is why I kept reading it to begin with! Perhaps the author had a deadline to reach and didn't have time to wrap up her book appropriately, or maybe she left us (as the reader) hanging on like that deliberately. Whatever the reason, I just didn't like how she chose to end the novel. The rest of the read up until that point was quite intriguing though.

Alice Seybold writes beautifully, even though this story could hardly be called a beautiful one. The entire tale spans just a couple of days, and she captures the mixed emotions and confused actions of the main character. Only read if you believe humans are an extremely complex species. Don’t count on a happy ending.

There are some impulses that, simply said, should never be acted upon. Unfortunately, people act upon them all too often. What allows a person to let go of their conscience and follow their dark desires? Helen Knightly should be able to tell you.

"Morality was just a security blanket that didn't exist. All of it, what I had done and what I was doing, was not leading me perilously toward the edge of a cliff. I had already jumped."

Helen might have started out as an ordinary child, but living with other-than-ordinary parents molded her into a supremely troubled adult. Her father took himself away frequently on what he called business, but often it had nothing to do with his job. And for as long as Helen can remember, her mother suffered from severe mental issues --- so severe that Helen felt like an outcast in their town. She learned to cope in strange ways.

Helen quietly went about daily living like most people. Then one day, she quits doing what is expected of her. When she does, she does it in a big way. She tumbles into an abyss of human tragedy and takes others down with her. One thoughtless, rash act sets in motion a series of events that rush to ruin not just Helen's family but others in her far-reaching grasp. At every intersecting point, one choice will take her to possible forgiveness; another, total devastation.

During the 24 hours that THE ALMOST MOON spans, Helen makes very few good choices. In fact, she makes such unbelievably bad choices --- one after another --- that it becomes hard to care about what happens to her. If she ever had a soul, it seems to have fled. Still, it is possible that one huge sacrifice on her part might put her back on the road to recovery, but she may yet be beyond salvation.

Certainly Helen's mother, Clair Knightly, sounds like a hard woman to love, although Helen says she does. She also claims to hate her. Helen wonders sometimes if her father, a gentle but essentially spineless man, died to escape his beautiful but unstable wife. Age never softened Clair. Her inveterate meanness persisted, assaulting her daughter with constant criticism and groundless derision. Clair was a woman incapable of being pleased. Yet Helen sacrificed her personal happiness to care for her mother. Whether out of guilt, a sense of duty or merely the strength of familial bond, even she may not understand her reasons. Her own failed marriage and strained relationships with her children probably stemmed from what ultimately tied her to her mother. The urge to be free must have been irresistible.

The line between a soul that is yet redeemable and one that is lost is fragile. Has Helen Knightly gone beyond the turning point? If not beyond, she certainly teeters on the brink. She spends one day after her awful deed indulging in retrospection. She rethinks her childhood, her marriage, her own motherhood, her friendships --- as if she's replaying her life in preparation for what she now faces. If she survives, she will face a burden worse than her abusive mother.

THE ALMOST MOON is as flawed as its main character. Had Alice Sebold chosen one conflict for Helen Knightly to resolve instead of allowing her to explode in many obscenely wrong directions, the result would have been more satisfying. As it is, Helen has too many problems converging in one day for her to adequately work out. With that caveat, this novel will keep you mesmerized, from the powerful opening sentence that will hit you like a blow to the chest to the stunning ending. And when you close the book for the final time, be prepared for a long night. Sleep will not come easily.

--- Reviewed by Kate Ayers

Helen Knightly is a middle-aged woman who has endured the manipulations and pain caused by her mother Clair, who is now eighty-eight years old and needs to be cared for in every way. Through a series of flashbacks, we are shown just how Helen's mother has sucked the very life out of her daughter. Now that Clair has to be cared for hand and foot, Helen asks herself: is she willing to give away more of her life to her mother? The answer is a big no. So she does what she feels is the best thing to do, she smothers her mother to death. The woman is miserable and in the brink of death anyway -- why not rush the process and put an end to both their miseries? Through a dark, disturbing, yet unfulfilling narrative, we see Helen's descent, as she does some unspeakable things, asking herself if she is as insane as her mother once was.

The Almost Moon is a very dark novel. Alice Sebold created a thought provoking and wonderful story with The Lovely Bones, which is why I had looked forward to reading this book. I love dark and disturbing novels that leave me thinking long after I've read them. Unfortunately, this isn't one of them. This is a little too tedious for me. It was a chore to read, and there is more telling than showing throughout the whole thing. The weaving of past and present is well done and I was never confused, and the way Sebold wraps it all up is rather convincing as well as disarming, but I had to force myself to care about both the story and the main character. I have no problems with flawed and unlikable protagonists, but Helen never drew me in. I was never able to get into her skin and imagine her world, simply because I couldn't care less. And shouldn't you care about the main character, warts and all? The Almost Moon is a two-star read at best. This is a weak follow-up to The Lovely Bones. The whole "sophomore slump" thing definitely applies to this author. However, it is up to you, the reader, to decide whether this novel is a hit or a miss.

Startling. Dark. Dysfunctional. Enlightening. These are all words that came to mind as I pushed my way through Alice Sebold's most recent effort. Despite the author's intensely brilliant writing, I immediately felt bogged down in the suffocating world of Helen Knightly. But what can one expect from a tale that begins with a statement about how easy it is to kill one's mother? The first third of the book was tough going, but once Helen's ex-husband, Jake, arrives to help her through the nightmare she's begun, the story finally takes off. I grew especially fond of Mr. Forrest, Helen's childhood neighbor, became more attached to the story, and eventually came to realize that the discomfort I was feeling was very likely purposeful on the part of the author. If you stay to listen, Sebold has a lot to say about mothers and daughters, reminding us that sometimes fathers have the power to redeem us all. - Beth Henkes

I picked up The Almost Moon, like so many others, after thoroughly enjoying The Lovely Bones. Unfortunately, this book is nothing like The Lovely Bones. Very little happens throughout the book, but after waiting through a few hundred pages of annoying barely-there plot, there is little or not resolution. The book is mostly flashbacks, primarily I suppose to explain why the protragonist behaves as she does, but they are rather uninteresting.

After about 50 pages, I could tell the book would focus on how Helen's mother had made her life miserable. I was loathe to read the rest but continued, hoping that I would be surprised. Instead, the book proceeded much as I expected, except that Helen was treated poorly by both her mother, her father, and a few neighbors. The story could have been interesting as many others have explored this topic successfully, but alas, in this telling, it simply isn't.

In short, even if you enjoyed The Lovely Bones, skip this book.

Not surprised that this book got so many negative reviews... the author deals with REAL life tragedy and suffering- rape and murder of a 14 year old girl (The Lovely Bones); rape (Lucky) a true story about this author's experience with this violent crime; and her second novel about a daughter killing her mother.

Best Selling "MONEY" author's would never write about such theme's or plot lines, because it's not the stuff readers will BUY. Some authors write multiple books each year (i.e. James Patterson) and people buy them... no matter that many are published to enhance the author's and his publisher's bank accounts... these "novel's" are just short story's if you delete empty pages and double spacing, large type... they do have a HOOK that "forces" people to buy them.

The Lovely Bones was an exception as a novel, as was Lucky an auto-biography... the former a smash bestseller, and the latter a VIEW of the effects of rape on the victim which received a higher rating in this crib than her bestseller.

Readers who gave both books few stars and negative reviews didn't get the MESSAGES being sent by the author to the audience. The Lovely Bones does an excellent and realistic job of explaining what an entire family goes through, their entire life after a child dies (rape/murder being the most horrific for parent's, et al family members to "accept"). The readers get comfort knowing that Susie is in limbo/heaven trying to help her family survive her death, without such comfort the book would very likely not have been such a success on the market. The movie required double the box's of eye tissues cause you SEE Susie, her family and killer... not just read words on paper.

Her 2nd novel doesn't have a anti-depression "pill" while covering a topic people don't want to think about (matricide)... let alone read. People (book readers) who have had family members with mental illness, suicide, etc. may find the book on target and give it a tad more stars cause mentally ill people ain't like you and me ("normal" people) who THINK rationally and logically... not just the opposite.

The first sentence of Alice Sebold's The Almost Moon is enough to grip readers from the very beginning, "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily". Almost immediately, we are struck with knowing that this book is going to be a very dark and insanely compelling read!

The Almost Moon is the story of nude model Helen Knightly's upbringing; as well as what Helen does within a 24-hour period after she kills her eighty-eight year old mentally ill and agoraphobic mother Clair. The novel jumps back and forth between past and present, and we learn along the way why Helen is compelled to kill her mom.

While the flashbacks of time are pertinent to the story, the novel becomes a page-turner because we are dying to know what happens in the present and how Helen deals with herself. Another interesting entity is that as the book goes on, I see Helen as a victim and NOT as a guilty murderer! I root for Helen throughout the book and hope that her outcome is positive and that she finds a way out of this. After all, one wouldn't think it would be so difficult to stage the death of an elderly, ailing woman.

The ending of The Almost Moon is unpredictable, and there is really no way we can figure out ahead of time what really happens. A statement is made early on in the book about how one of Helen's mother's neighbors named Mrs. Leverton competes with Clair regarding who will outlive the other. This revelation does play into the outcome of the novel.

Overall I think this book is miraculous because of its easy style and how readable it is. The book was so interesting and engaging that it took me a few hours to read all the way through in one day. The Lovely Bones is also a fantastic novel, and I think Alice Sebold's future novels will always be considered mandatory reading for me.

Author: Bread of Shame

The idea of the "almost moon" is explained by Mr. Knightly to Helen, the teen daughter of a mentally ill woman whose incomprehensible behavior has both disturbed and confused the girl ever since she can remember. An only child, she seeks consolation in her father's words, who assures her that her mother, Clair, is indeed beautiful but that the woman's beauty is only partially apparent to the child, as all truths are, because one sees only a glimpse of what a person truly is, the rest is shading like the invisible parts of the moon as it waxes and wanes, depending upon the light from the sun. The symbol is apt; the moon is associated with what is mysterious and inexplicable in women: the menstrual cycle and thus the passionate outbursts and compensatory withdrawal, all the various undercurrents of female emotion. Like the issue of truth itself, the human being is complex, the viewer of any given personality beholding only the incomplete truth of a person's character. Similarly, the kindly Mr. Forrest, who is himself incompletely known due to his own efforts, attempts to explain to the confused teen that although Helen's mother was a neighborhood pariah, he saw her as endowed with grace and intelligence, a muse of sorts to her embattled husband. Much later, ruminating on his words, Helen finally realizes what her father and Mr. Forest tried to explain all those years ago. This epiphany occurs just when Helen regards her own fate as being as hopeless and unspeakable as that of her doomed parents. "The Almost Moon" is a powerful novel of comprehensive psychological insight and literary artistry. Sebold's use of internal monologue, poetic language and multiple literary devices to express the redemptive rewards of the examined life identifies her as a master of literary fiction.

Similar to Sebold's "The Lovely Bones," "The Almost Moon" concerns the dark truths of human nature - those incomprehensible acts of malice and neglect that are often the lot of the innocent. Like the victim in "The Lovely Bones," Helen does nothing to deserve her fate. She is merely born into a family of two misfits: a mentally disturbed mother and her co-dependent husband. Although the husband accepts the burden of his wife's condition, he sees in her a rare physical beauty as well as a deep emotional neediness reflective of her narcissism. From time to time, he escapes the hold she has on him and retreats to his childhood home, now a derelict structure on the cliff of a flooded incline, the repository of the plywood images of his shadowy families, a mattress upon which he sleeps, craven photos, and a few of the carved rocking horses he's made for years. At one time he disappeared from the family for three months, the story being told that he visited relatives, when in fact, he was in a mental institution recovering from the stress of caring for his wife. These are some of the secrets surrounding Helen as she grows up. Thanks to Mr. Forest, who is the first to reveal Helen's mother is "mentally ill," and to her father for his one vacation with her where he takes her to his childhood home, Helen is at last able to piece together what her parents' legacy actually was. That her father did not accidentally fall down the stairs, but instead shot himself in the head and then fell, is the last terrible truth she discovers before she herself compounds the crimes of her family by murdering her mother, Clair.

Helen is 49 and a seemingly devoted daughter when she smothers her mother with towels, breaking her nose in the process. She is divorced and geographically separated from her grown daughters. She is alone, pursuing her career as an artists' model at Westmore College. For twenty years, she has dutifully assumed all the responsibility for her querulous mother, whom she labels a "totemic presence," and whose favorite epithet for her daughter is "the b-word." Helen clips her mother's toenails, feeds her, watches endless television with her, takes her to the doctors and hair stylists, and generally does more than most daughters in an endless attempt to "assume the burden of her mother," as she refers to the task. Her mother claims there are "People living in my walls." And so there are: the faceless demons that have always been an integral part of Clair's personality. Helen alludes to her visits to her mother as "unusually unpleasant encounters." Yet she persists, as codependent on her mother as her deceased father was when he was still alive. The mother has a reputation for cruelty, calls Mrs. Castle, who tries to take care of her a vicious name, and is basically intolerant of all her neighbors. At one time in the past she watched a child hit by a car die in her presence without trying to help him. For that negligence she has been ostracized by the neighborhood, yet she has refused to move elsewhere, still residing in her shabby house of unpleasant associations among people who have long ago rejected her. At 88, she is pathetic in her dementia and her spite, a reflection of what her true character always was, claims Helen in her reveries.

The book is elliptical, circling from past to present, drawing Faulknerian analogies of association and metaphor until the reader catches on that most of the truths of this family are buried and gradually reveal their significance as Helen looks back into the darkly confused past, one whose atmosphere during her father's life "had a weight and a force that crushed me." She recalls how she and her father have "always shared the burden of her mother" and she resents the fact that her father shot himself, thereby shifting the burden of her mother's care to her. At the time she murders her mother, she recognizes that the woman's condition of colon cancer will require that she leave her house and that her agoraphobia will make that situation grossly uncomfortable and frightening. Nevertheless, Helen wants her mother to make that transition with the least possible embarrassment. Thus, when her mother soils herself while sitting in a chair, Helen is overcome with the final indignity she herself must endure in the guardianship of her mother. "Helen comments on the deplorable insubstantiality of her mother's "truth," suggesting that it was apparent in this final act, this woman whom Helen considers to have always been "a woman of appearances," even if now she stands in her own defilement, at last revealed for what she truly was. She intends to clean her mother one last time before she calls the ambulance to take her to the hospital and then presumably to the Home. However, inexplicably she smothers her with the towels with which she intended to clean off the excrement. She drags her mother downstairs to the basement and cuts off her signature braid as a souvenir. After that Helen leaves the home of her childhood and seeks out her best friend's son and sleeps with him. She is apparently in need of human connection, some kind of weird affirmation of her body and personhood, but which action is baffling and unbelievable to the reader -- that is, until it all makes sense, which it does by the end of the novel. She heaves her mother into the basement, comparing her, wrapped in blankets, to "a giant mother burrito." There is hostility in her treatment of her mother -- malice as well, one might claim.

It is then that the history of the family unfolds in its complexity. Helen recalls throwing water in her mother's face when she was sixteen. She relates how her own daughter Emily refused to visit Clair after she dropped Emily's son Leo and injured him. How her father disappeared for ninety days and no one heard from him and how he allegedly years later fell down the stairs to his death. How her mother rubbed the skin on her chest raw from anxiety. Her mother always criticized Helen's looks, competing with her physically, and repeatedly referring to her as fat. Helen's mother had been a lingerie model, and ironically and similarly, Helen poses for painters. Helen surreptitiously wears her mother's rose petaled slip and obsessively recalls all the old pictures of her mother modeling various pieces of lingerie. Helen's ex-husband Jake reminds her that "Your mother ruined so much." Always supportive of Helen, he nevertheless divorces her so that Helen sees the reason for the divorce being Jake "stopped painting her." This is the kind of neglect she could not endure since so much of her identity was wrapped up with her association to her mother, a model of lingerie.

In fact, it is the killing of her mother that leaves Helen the most bereft because without her mother and her own duties in that regard, she has no identity. Even her revealing her whole nude, unexposed self to painters attempting to render the truth of their model, she has had her essence obscured, blocked by her own diminished commitment to the job and by the fact that she no longer has a legacy to follow, no one to compete with in terms of beauty and desirability. Her ex-husband seems to recognize the fact that she is still in competition with her mother when he continually reminds her, "This is not about you." In fact, this is about the murder of her narcissistic mother. About her father, Jake further contends, "I know he loved you" whereas Helen felt his shooting himself indicated a lack of love on his part. Her mother says of her late husband, Helen's father, on the subject of his suicide, "He finally did it," suggesting how long was the ordeal of caring for Clair and how much it cost him. For Helen, too, the burden was unendurable. She laments that for the first year of her marriage she had nightmares, always of various boxes, a Freudian symbol of woman. Her mother is constantly juxtaposed with the image of the downstairs freezer, symbolizing what to Helen seemed a cold nature, a rigidly hateful one that drove those close to her away.

Much of the book's last section is an elaborate denouement of protracted explanations and amplifications of truths already revealed. Sometimes this is slightly laborious, but in the end it all fits together and further enriches the narrative. Insight continues to build as tangential facts and impressions provide further insight into the complex relationship between Helen and her mother. All of this is part of the self-examination Helen needs in order to put the subject of her mother's death into perspective. Helen says of herself after the murder, "I didn't know who I was anymore." For as her father implied on their one trip together to the moldering house of his boyhood, those memories have shaped her and made her the woman she is, however crippled and imprisoned by them she feels. So it was with her father who recalled his own family in that house as he continued to build plywood figures of their likenesses, their particular shadows, as well as those of Clair, Helen and himself in perhaps sunnier days before the burden of Clair became intolerable, before he was beaten down by her demands. It is because he told Helen these things about his own yearnings that she tries hard as a mother, guiding her own children as selflessly as she can despite the legacy of selfishness her mother epitomized. When Jake tells her, "I loved you, "Helen," he is reminding her that she was lovable because she did love her daughters and him. That is how the two women differed in the final analysis. Helen, so tormented by her insane mother, was still able to love.

In fact, it was the very love for her imperfect mother that motivated Helen to the end, perhaps even in the murder itself. Although she harbored a deep animosity for her mother, she has until the very end of the woman's life protected her from physical and emotional pain. She has nursed her lovingly, as she did her own girls. She has tended to her through all sorts of unpleasant hygienic rituals and emotional demands. She has spent time with her without complaining, even though no one else would because the woman was unappreciative and vicious. Helen's daughter Sarah says of her grandmother, "She sucked you dry." And that alone could be the explanation for the murder of her mother, but for the fact that it was Helen who insisted that her mother not be subject to the indignity of going to a Home, where no one would provide her the services her daughter had. When the time comes for her own seemingly inevitable suicide, Helen at last realizes that she has actually been a good daughter and a good wife; she has, in fact, met the conditions of extraordinary humanhood and will continue to do so. She will accept the responsibility of her crime and she will atone for it in all the possible ways she can: by teaching the prison inmates, by being honest to her girls and especially by not traumatizing them in the ways her own father did her. On the subject of killing her mother, she tells her daughter Emily in a letter, "It was the right thing to do." She adds, "I love you, Emily. Remember that over everything." With that admonition Helen realizes that she did love her family and that she did give them the ultimate gift. She then opens the outside window to the clean air and recognizes a fact about herself: "She's not here," that there's "no sign of her" in the darkness, as the police searching for her next door announce in the darkness. She is concealed by the absence of light; she is the "almost moon" her father described over thirty years ago.

This superb novel is a meditation on life - both its tribulation and unfairness. What would it be like to be raised by a mother who was hopelessly mentally ill and by a man who was unable to protect his daughter from the mother's wrath and powerless to keep its hooks from claiming his soul as well? These are dark concerns but they are powerfully rendered by this deft writer. No, the truth is not worthless or insubstantial, as Helen unwisely observes before she is enlightened. The truth does, in fact, set one free. And so does Helen Knightly belatedly achieve self-awareness and an opportunity to atone for her actions. So is she finally as redeemed as any pilgrim in a world where one sees "through a glass darkly" and only partially. Yet one can "know thyself," as Socrates implored. Who wiser than the Old Teacher to represent the obvious truth of human life? Plywood figures or Globes? Which instrument of "truth" would you pick? And so does Helen Knightly belatedly pick up the gauntlet and assume her interrupted journey beyond the shadows to the Absolutes. Mandalas, anyone?

Marjorie Meyerle
Colorado Writer
Author: Bread of Shame

The Almost Moon: A Novel by Alice Sebold pulls out all the stops and blurs the boundaries of morality and a normal life. Helen Knightley is a woman haunted by her past and her present, so much so that it drives her to do the unthinkable.

***Spoiler Alert***

While my friend Anna had read this book before me, I had forgotten much of what she told me until I came to the part where Helen smothers her elderly mother. I'm not telling you anything that you won't find out in the first chapter. The book is not about the events leading up to her mother's murder, but how Helen came to the conclusion that murder was the answer and how that answer was shaped by her childhood and her first marriage.

For me, the main problem I had with the novel was my inability to feel sorry for Helen. It's not that I didn't find her life hard as a child with an agoraphobic mother and a bipolar father, with suicidal tendencies; I guess the narration jumped around too much for me to delve deeper into the character's feelings and psyche. I always felt like Helen was keeping us just outside a wall that we were not allowed to jump over. I guess you could say I felt a bit like Hamish, her best friend's son and her lover. He says at one point in the book that he knows Helen has a good heart, but that she can be "so cold" sometimes. This is how I felt about Helen.

Her actions jump from murdering her mother to sleeping with her best friend's son, right after calling her ex-husband she hasn't spoken to in years to confess her crime. While I can see the connection between her murdering her mother and calling the one person she believed would understand her motivations, I was taken aback by the sudden sexual interlude between her and Hamish. Perhaps she was in shock, perhaps she was hoping the sex would release something pent up inside of her. I really cannot say.

The journey from leaving her mother in the basement to the discovery of her murder by the police is intertwined with childhood memories and memories of her marriage to Jake, the artist, painter, and sculptor. These are the scenes I enjoyed most. I was given a rare glimpse into Helen's life that shaped her current persona. It allowed me to garner a sense of her inner turmoil where her mother was concerned and how she always seemed to identify herself as on her father's side. The transition at the end from realizing that her father was not the victim but an enabler was fantastic. It was almost like it took Helen her entire life to realize the marriage and their problems at home were the result of two people in dire need of psychological assistance, not just her mother as she had always presumed.

And in a way, I wanted more of a resolution, not Helen's speculations on the matter. Was she going to escape or was she arrested and sent to prison for her mother's murder? These are the questions that still linger for me.

***End Spoiler Alert***

While her mother is referred to as The Almost Moon early on in the book, I came to believe it was Helen and her father that the phrase referred to most.

If you are looking for another Lucky or Lovely Bones, The Almost Moon is not it. This book made the commuting time on the bus and metro fly by, but the tail end of the book dragged for me. I think a few of the descriptive pages could have been cut out to make the ending more powerful for the character.

The Almost Moon is the second novel by Alice Sebold. Helen Knightly narrates the story, which begins when she murders her mother, Clair. As we follow events over the next 24 hours, we learn about Helen's life and what brought her to this momentous act: her love-hate relationship with her mentally-ill mother; her career as an artist's model; her failed marriage; her dysfunctional relationship with her daughters. Helen has spent her whole life exposed to mental illness so it seems almost inevitable that she will question her own sanity. Sebold explores loyalty and devotion, and the fine line that exists between the impulse and the act. This is a powerful and passionate story, full of black humour. I enjoyed The Lovely Bones: this one is at least as good, if not better!

The writing is good, and the story is compelling enough to stay with it til the end to find resolution; however, The Almost Moon doesn't deliver. The main character, Helen, who reveals in the first sentence that she has just killed her mother, remains highly unlikable and unsympathetic on nearly every page. Upon reading the last sentence, I asked myself, "What was the point?" Author, Alice Sebold, succeeds at painting three-dimensional characters and presents an interesting storyline, but this effort is no match to her first novel, The Lovely Bones.

This first person account includes the details of her mother's murder, and the aftermath, which is filled with wildly inappropriate and rather insane behavior. Helen goes back and forth in time, illustrating memories from her childhood as the daughter of mentally unstable parents--an agoraphobic mother and a long-suffering, suicidal father. It did, at times, lead me to examine my own relationships with my parents and my children, and one thought loomed large, which comes to Helen as she's posing nude for an art class the morning after she commits murder: "The idea that my mother was eternal like the moon. I wanted to laugh in my awkward pose at the inescapable nature of it. Dead or alive, a mother or the lack of a mother shaped one's whole life." This is the entire premise of the book, and unfortunately, the other 290 pages were a waste of time.

Michele Cozzens, Author of A Line Between Friends and The Things I Wish I'd Said.

The best part of reading Sebold is the interesting, quirky way she approaches serious topics. She pushes her themes of madness and murder to the edge of the horror genre. Although the writer doesn't crossover to a true vampire tale, I almost wish she had. Instead, we get a life-sucking mother and the psychologically-bitten daughter. Both of whom are, not far into the book, unlikeable characters and impossible for me to connect with. The story has a promising start with Helen Knightly stating in the opening line that she's committed the most ignoble crime, matricide. The writer is masterful in capturing a tortured childhood ruled by mental illness - that of both the obviously sick mother and seemingly enabler father. You don't have to like the child or the adult she has become to appreciate how the child Helen tones survival skills to negotiate her place in the family. Although she is born late into her parents' marriage, she is not the adored only child one would expect to meet; she's the interloper between two people who would have done best if left to dance together alone. Yet, the good stuff about the book doesn't save it. The beautifully writ language notwithstanding, the characters fail to ring completely true. The characters and the plot hang, never becoming entirely believable as either the monsters of fantasy or in reality one's own declining parent or odd next-door neighbor. Two scenes are especially abhorrent: Helen's trophy-taking in serial-killer fashion and the mob of neighbors bent on hurting the mother and attacking the girl in her stead. This is a dark, disturbing story with an unfinished ending. It failed to illuminate the generational destruction of untreated mental illness. That's another crime.

I don't understand the negative reviews of this book at all. I love it. The main character makes lots of mistakes, which, for me, adds to the human/realistic aspect of the story. She's not perfect, and I winced several times while reading because I just couldn't believe the choices she (the main character) made. It was as if a friend was telling me her own personal story.

I read some other reviews that said they thought the characters were uninteresting, flat, and boring. I feel totally opposite. The characters are the kind of people I encounter in every-day life. They're quirky, unpredictable and a little bit crazy.

I read this book in less than 3 days. I just couldn't put it down.

Fans of Alice Sebold may not enjoy this deviation from her norm, but if you can treat "The Almost Moon" as its own entity in the face of such successes as "Lucky" and "The Lovely Bones", then you may just enjoy it.

Half of the reviews out there are from people who hated it and called it a book "fans should stay away from" but if you enjoy her work, you should give this a try for yourself. Sebold has a fluid writing style that makes the story enjoyable to read, despite being about a very grim subject.

Sebold's main character, Helen Knightly, starts off the book by letting you know that she has just killed her mother, Clair. Helen was summoned to her mother's house, as she had been many times before, to assist her with the common everyday tasks of cleaning herself and changing her clothes. Helen then realizes suddenly that she is tired of the burden of her mother and ends her life.

What transpires throughout the book from then on are the events that occur over the following 24 hours since the incident, peppered with flashbacks from Helen's life as a child and beyond that help to flesh out a motive for why Helen did what she did.

Clair, as is told to us, was cold, mean and insane--the character being based on Sebold's own mother. Helen's father was tormented by his love for his hopeless wife and eventually ended his own life. Helen has no one to turn to as a child, except for her one and only friendly neighbor, Mr. Forrest. The rest of the neighborhood is intent on making the family move, due to an incident that occurs that showcases Clair's depth of insanity and lack of human connection.

Helen is now a divorced, middle aged woman with 2 grown children and a career as a nude model. In the wake of killing her mother, Helen sleeps with Hamish, the 30 year old son of her best friend for whom Helen feels a pang of guilt. She goes back and forth over how she has known him since he was a baby but some people sleep with people 20 years younger than them. But then, those people are not best friends with their lover's mother. This helps to add to her already messy situation and instability and causes her to question whatever shreds were left of her morality. And if things weren't bad enough, Helen's ex-husband, Jake, involuntarily ends up as an accomplice in Clair's murder.

If you have grown up in an environment similar to the one Helen grew up in, it is easy to relate to her but makes reading the book a bit more emotionally difficult at times. You find yourself actually hoping at certain points that Helen literally gets away with murder for all of the struggles her mother put her through.

But at the same time, you hope for justice, because you can understand how deeply disturbed her mother was and yet Helen killed her when she was at her most defenseless, being elderly and completely deranged. If Helen had already put up with the worst of what she was ever going to get, why would she kill her mother now when she had so few years left to live as it was? But then you can understand that someone as cold as Clair who is now so dependent on Helen could cause Helen's resentment to flare, in a "why should I now take care of her when she never took care of me?" kind of way.

Will Helen get away with murder? Ultimately, should she? Was her mother truly as terrible as she made her out to be or did Helen finally just reach her breaking point? Will there be a calm resolution to this horribly messy situation? Read "The Almost Moon" and find out!

The story is about a mother-daughter dynamic that is diseased to the core; a dynamic that had gone on for 40 years and ended when the 50-year-old daughter killed her mother who was dying of dementia. The book is about what happens after the murder including flashbacks that span the duration of that dynamic with some anecdotes that will make your heart weep.

First off, this book is beautifully written. Alice Sebold has a penchant for making the bizarre and twisted lyrical and even ethereal. Her writing made reading this book tolerable. The story itself, however, had a different effect on me. It's very disturbing and heartbreaking. The first paragraph in the book goes as follows:

"When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily. Dementia, as it descends, has a way of revealing the core of the person affected by it. My mother's core was rotten like the brackish water at the bottom of a weeks-old vase of flowers. She had been beautiful when my father met her and still capable of love when I became their late0in0life child, but by the time she gazed up at me that day, none of this mattered."

Helen, the 50-year-old murderous protagonist, truly hated her mother, and loved her all in the same measure. As she lets the reader in on her most inner thoughts, reasons and memories, a heavy mental and emotional toll is taken and the heartbreak starts to mount.

One of the most disturbing scenes in this book starts with Claire, Helen's mother, letting teenage Helen fend for herself when a group of six men knock on their door and ask to speak to Claire about an incident that happened in the neighborhood a month back. The men were livid and wanted to hurt Claire, who was scared. Instead of not answering the door, she lets Helen handle the situation while she goes down to the basement and turns on the radio. One of the men ends up attacking Helen, all the while Claire in the basement listening to music.

Every anecdotal story that is recounted by Helen gives the reader more insight into the level of mental illness with which this family is afflicted. The sad part is that Helen is a mother of two adult women and a grandmother to boot. If the pathology is hereditary, which is what the book suggests, how will the rest of the family fare? You'll find out when you read this book, which is not a pleasant read, but it's a window into a world hardly discussed and characters hardly portrayed. For that alone, this is a worthwhile read.

The Almost Moon is a shocking story about a woman named Helen Knightly who has been taking care of her ailing mother for some time. As soon as you read the first line, you know that Helen ends up killing her sick mother. So with that information, the book takes off with Helen trying to figure out what to do with her mother's body. All the while she is having flashbacks of her life and her mothers odd behavior. It turns out her mother was suffering from severe depression from early on.

While reading this book, I found myself in shock quite a few times. I almost felt like I was watching a train wreck, I knew it was bad, but I just couldn't look away. Not to say that this book was 'bad', but the author writes several graphic and shocking passages. I really was stunned. I felt bad for Helen as she recounted the memories from her childhood. However, I didn't particularly like Helen's character and I found some of the things she did to be atrocious. I did feel bad for Helen's mother who suffered from such a horrible mental illness and her father who struggled to keep his family together.
As strange as the story was, I found Alice Sebold's writing to be exellent. Several times I found myself going back and re-reading a passage.

With this book Julian Baggini continues to qualify himself as a contemporary successor of Bertrand Russell. In a clear and entertaining prose he shows us the contribution philosophy and philosophers can make, if we look for the meaning of (our personal) life. Baggini blows metaphysical fog away but doesn't oversimplify. Let me mention especially chapter 4 "Here to help", where he discusses the proper place altruism may have in a meaningful life. "If the meaning of life is to help others, then only those doing the helping can lead meaningful lifes. The people being helped are thus mere instruments to the end of giving purpose to the altruists." (p. 65) Baggini doesn't deny the importance of altruism but emphasizes that altruism makes sense in defending values which go beyond itself. "Becoming a contender" (chapter 7) is an extraordinary good read too. Here Baggini follows more or less the old bumper sticker saying "Life's a mountain not a beach" but pleads for not choosing a mountain of exaggerated height in relation to your personal capacities. "To raise a happy family, or live your life pursuing your passion, no matter which recognition you get, should be seen as a success." (p. 123) That's a good example for the overall line of differentiated common sense the book follows. In criticizing the promises of ideological and religious beliefs (see especially chapter 9 "Lose your self") there is also a strong democratic and egalitarian commitment in the book: you don't need (or even more: beware of) any guru or esoteric knowledge to find the meaning of your life - just look and struggle yourself.

I once thought that perhaps Will Durant's book was the best introduction to philosophy, and then I thought "Sophie's World" was. Now both of those books are well worth your time if you intend to get a peek at the Western philosophical tradition.

However, I think this is the best introduction to philosophy, not merely as what philosophers think about, but as thought about meaningful stuff.

Baggini's arguments are concise to the point of dismissive, so anytime you disagree you'll long for a consideration of your objections, but he moves along briskly from one issue to the next. Even though I disagree with about 1/4 of his opinions, so I understand the feeling, I think he's got the picture in sharp focus; someone who believes (like, say, Cottingham) that religion is key to meaningful life will probably be too frustrated by this book to finish it. For a longer consideration and rejection of the theistic POV, you've got to go elsewhere.

Anyway, the point of my review is that, if you're a layperson (like me) who's interested in thinking about the meaning of life (and stuff) (like me) then this is a very good book for you. Even if you disagree with his conclusion, everyone recommends the process of thinking through your adversaries' positions. Baggini and I both went through Cottingham, and he through several others as well, for instance.

Another good feature of the text is that if you move on to other modern philosophy books, directed at the philosophy crowd rather than at laypeople, you'll find that this book has prepared you for the arguments you encounter.

A difficulty of reviewing this book is that, frankly, it has to be read to be appreciated. No concise summary is possible. Except, the meaning of life is, like, to live. You want to see it discussed intelligently?

Then I highly recommend this book.

I don't get the negative reviews. Sebold is beyond a great writer. One reason she is so great is she doesn't follow a cooker cutter approach. She doesn't use words or phrases that have been used thousands of times to tell a story. Each of her books stands alone and makes you think. Since I'm late in the review game I will not get into the whole story. I will say that this is not a typical murder mystery. The entire novel actually takes place in about 24 hours and is told through flashbacks and memories. The opening line, "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily" is chilling and sucked me in all the way to the end.

I liked the story within the story. The back story as the main character thought back over her life was interesting and well handled. However, the story of the murder and subsequent events was entirely too detailed and gruesome. I eventually get tired of all these gruesome details and did not read the last half of the book. The author could have made her point even if she devoted less space to this. I could n't wait for the author to return to the far more interesting back story.

I was mesmorized by the beginning of the book and the hope that Alice Sebold had created another riveting plot line that would rival The Lovely Bones. Unfortunately, as Helen ripped off her mother's clothing and dragged her down to the basement, the book was dragged down with it. Although I do believe this was an honest portrayal of living with mental illness, I was truly repelled by the death scene. I did finish the book as I was engaged by the characters and wanted to see where she would go with them. I felt the explanation of the title was very poignant and insigntful and that alone made it worth reading. This is one of those books that will generate very strong feelings, which is often what writers strive for, especially when dealing with such controversial subject matter.

Right from the start you're thinking what is wrong with this woman, she is crazy. That being said, it's what made this a great book. It was dark and depressing and left me shaking my head that this was really happening but I couldn't wait to see what she'd do next. Her actions were unpredictable so it kept the story interesting. Surprised by the other poor reviews, I think others may just not be able to get past how whacked the main character is, but I say enjoy it and be glad it's not you.

I love Alice Sebold's writing style. This book brought up a subject matter that was uncomfortable. The main characters actions and responses were not what most people would like to think about much less read about. But this book made me really think about her characters in a way where I wanted to understand and make sense of them. In the end, there was little to no closure, but a reality that was appropiate. Everyone one loves a happy ending, but some books that give you that do not provoke the kind of emotion this book did for me. I think that if your looking for a book with complex characters and one that really makes you think and feel, read it. If you want the perfect happy ending that leaves you smiling inside, don't.

I would not recommend this novel unless you don't mind a protagonist that is self loathing, dispicable, and down right unlikable. 40-something, divorced, caretaker to her elderly mother with Alzheimer's and history of agoraphobia is the main character, who probably herself is mentally ill in some fashion. The opening of the book takes us into the scene of her and her mother- and ultimately the mother is dead.

I found the style of writing quite confusing- most of the book weaves between real time and past events, with no clear transistion that the reader was going between the two. The real time part of the story occurs over the course of about 24 hours, but the protagonist's narration takes the reader back in time from her childhood, through college, and different impressionable events that occurred with her parents. At times I contemplated liking it, particularly when stories of the past were being played out- it helped to give the reader an understanding of what brings the current situation at hand, and maybe give a twinge of sympathy for her. But when back in the present, her actions are so ridiculous that any possible likablity fall away.

A fulfilling feeling that I got when reading Baggini's "What's It All About?" was `I never thought of that!'; if you are a layman (like myself) who are interested in thinking about meaning of life, then this is a good book that provides a useful starting point for such thinking. Baggini has concisely introduced various perspectives in examining `the meaning of life'. His analysis is coherent and he is honest about his personal point of view. Although I do not agree on all his viewpoints (e.g. His belief that Buddhism's framework to be inadequate and not worth examining), I do understand the rationale of his perspective and appreciate his `rationalist-humanistic' approach.

Good literature is like good art. According to writer Annie Dillard it should be like a big dog dragging you into traffic. Good literature disturbs, and Almost Moon is disturbing. As a reader, you can't really like the main character or her mentally ill mother. You can't "enjoy" the subject matter. Matricide isn't pretty, after all. But Sebold addresses the subject of family dysfunction and its long-lasting effects frankly and boldly. The novel fascinates because it does not engage reader identification in some ways -- who wants to think about killing one's mother. But it also fascinates because it engenders thought: What would I do? Could I maintain kindness in the face of an elderly parent turned abusive other? How can we alter the face mental illness in this country to prevent such tragedies? Who suffers and why? Sebold explores the dark reaches of the human psyche in this novel. If you are unprepared to be dragged into the dark, then don't read this novel. If you have a strong stomach and an enquiring mind, then relish it.

This book was definitely very different than I would have expected.

Helen Knightly has reached the end of her rope with her mentally disabled mother and having charge of her since she lost her father years ago when he killed himself. So it is one day that she decides to end it all and kills her mother by smothering her too death with a blanket, and then leaves her out on the porch at first. She then takes off after deciding to haul her mom down to the basement in the freezer, afraid of anyone finding out. Neighbors are calling to find out what is going on in there, and Helen does her best to put them off. Helen takes off then for her own home, but stops on the way to see her friend Natalie. Discovering Natalie is not there, but her young son is, another strange thing happens. Helen asks Hamish to have sex with her, and they do on the backseat of the car. He is half Helen's age, and yet, on the spur of the moment, the two are really going at it. I found this very odd after murdering her mother to do this. From there, she finally does go home, and rolls around the grass before going inside her house.

She becomes hysterical about her crime later, and calls her ex-husband Jake, to tell him about what she did. Jake agrees to come and help her get herself together, but only if she'll go to the police.

From there, the story takes many turns. The police suspect Helen after awhile, and she tries to make up stories the whole way through it which of course, don't add up. Her two daughters come home, and she does tell one of them alone that she killed grandma. After telling one of her daughters this-she takes off to escape someplace, not knowing for sure what to do.

The book goes back and forth between past and present, and tells about the mother unbalanced as she was her whole life, and in deep depression as well as agoraphobic and unable to function outside the house. When the mother did have to leave, she had to cover up totally so as not to see the outside world around her, for fear something would happen. She became this way after witnessing a terrible accident where one of the neighbor boys was tragically killed on his bicycle. It totally knocked her over the loop, and she was all the more disabled after that.

This was perhaps, one of the strangest books I have ever read. I had to find out what happened to Helen, so I kept on with it. It does become even more interesting as you read on in that you wonder what the outcome is going to be for Helen.

Helen Knightly has spent all her life looking after her mother, Clair, in some form or fashion, being tied to her in an unhappy, unhealthy, unrelenting relationship that has taken a toll on her in various ways. Now, Clair's dementia has reached the point that something has to be done; she is going to have to leave the house--a task that was psychologically painful and difficult for Clair--as she is no longer fit to stay home by herself. Helen is relieved and anxious at the same time and as she deals with her mother's vitriolic tongue and loose bowels, she surprises herself by smothering Clair.

Over the next 24 hours, Helen behaves as irrationally as any human being would, becomes entangled more and more in a web of lies and (through memories) exorcises some of the demons of past as she deals with the mental illness of her family.

Sebold has done an incredible job of writing about mental illness, and as an author she passes no judgments, gives no advice, just has Helen tell her story and leaves the rest to the reader. In Helen, one sees a character so human and unpredictable that it was almost uncomfortable at times to read her thoughts, feeling like an intruder or eavesdropper.

I read several negative reviews and I think it was really Sebold's amazing talent that prompted these. Those readers that complained about this or that action of Helen's appear to have been expecting Sebold to pass the appropriate (to them) moral judgments on said action and when she didn't these readers assume she condones these actions. Other readers couldn't believe Helen would act the way she did, having apparently never acted irrationally under stress themselves, and didn't see the deep realism of Helen's character acted out in her irrationality.

I found it a very moving book and at times it was too emotionally taxing and I had to take a break from it. It's hard to say I "liked" it, because, how can one "like" a story about mental illness in all it's dirty, real life, day-to-day struggles. I was reminded of Nabokov's Lolita--I didn't "like" the subject matter, but loved the book. This is another instance of that. The Almost Moon, while not for everyone, is a emotion-packed, realistic novel from a very talented author.

This book is a masterpiece. The protagonist leads the reader through an anti-apologia that perfectly expresses the conflicts inherent in a "mortality project" [as opposed to an immortality project] painfully undertaken by a woman whose parents could not manage to raise her, so involved were they in their struggles against life. When I finished this book I marveled: It was like a non-film representation of how a wounded antelope runs the entire length of the veldt. You know the antelope will eventually be eaten but you appreciate the run. If there were more stars, I would give Sebold a sixth and seventh.

I too am surprised at the disappointing reviews of this novel. I loved it, and for many days after finishing it, Helen stayed in my thoughts. Her journey through childhood to the opening scene was nicely drawn with smooth transitions between past to present. The daughters and ex-husband were realistic and added a richness to this heartbreaking story. True, it is a dark story, but very good fiction often is; and the ending is the perfect choice to lift the reader toward a lighter place.

THE ALMOST MOON

I knew by the second paragraph of this book that I would NOT like it. I loved the LOVELY BONES and, while I don't like to compare novels, this one was a waste of my time. Especially compared to the LOVELY BONES, God forbid I compare!

Helen murders her aged mom. Her mom was a horrible person, she took over Helen's life and made everyone around her miserable. Did she deserve to die? Who cares! Did Helen get away with murder? Who cares? Helen was so messed up because of her mom and her past, but I just didn't care. The book revolves around the murder, Helen trying to cover up the murder, her actions for a few days after the murder, and constant flashbacks of her life. I ususally enjoy books that are written in this mode, but did NOT care for this one.

But I guess you, the reader, have figured that out by now. I am so glad I am DONE with this book --

I don't like giving negative reviews. There is no way to mince words here; however, this book was not good. I just didn't care about anyone or anything that happened to anybody. The main reason I did not care for this book was the main character, Helen. I didn't like her as a person and for that reason, didn't care for how she handled anything in her life. In my mind, since I didn't like her, NOTHING she did or anything she said seemed correct to me. That may be a wrong basis for not enjoying a book, but she totally rubbed me the wrong way. However, maybe the author intended for her character NOT to be liked.

I am surprised that I even finished this book, but I wanted to see how it ended. How I wish I would have just peeked at the ending and saved myself some time.

I will not be recommending this book to ANYONE. I will pass my copy along to my local library. However, check out THE LOVELY BONES, it was great.

Thank you and sorry for being such a grouch re this book!

Pam

Like many of the other positive reviewers on this site, I think that many people did not understand this book or maybe just could not tolerate its dark subject. Sebold is a fabulous writer who has shown her compassion for people by writing about the most painful subjects with such clarity and respect, which is what I found in The Almost Moon. Most people, whether raised by a mentally ill parent or not, cannot conceive of the act committed by the book's protagonist, even though if we are honest with ourselves, we have all done and are capable of doing things that push past the limits of what is morally acceptable. I find the negative reviews of this book based on the readers' emotional responses to the subject of matricide, and am dismayed at the lack of empathy for a character whose life has been framed by two mentally ill parents. While The Lovely Bones was a very good book, the fact that the protagonist is an utterly blameless and sympathetic character is the reason, in my opinion, that it fares so much better with the public. I hope that more people are able to push past their distaste to discover this fabulous book; it far supersedes The Lovely Bones.

This book is a disappointment compared to Sebold's previous works, Lucky and The Lovely Bones. The writing in Moon is lacking. The narrative is written in first person from Helen's point of view. Within the first chapter, Helen has killed her mother, a bitter, terrible woman suffering from dementia. The book then alternates between Helen's activities following the murder and flashbacks of herself growing up under her mother's influence. The flashbacks are great, the best part of the story. There is almost a hint of crazy family style seen in Jeannette Wall's The Glass Castle. Helen tries desperately to justify her mother's ways while loathing them at the same time. There is a great deal of insight into Helen's relationship with her parents and how mental illness affected them all. But when Helen returns to the present, her thoughts are scattered and her actions erratic. One could argue for trauma to explain her behavior, but Helen just didn't seem to click with me. I was also let-down by the way the book ended. Sebold presents no conclusion to a conflict I was desperate to see come to an end. It left me wanting more, even though I was relieved to be finished. This was a sub-par follow-up to Sebold's bestsellers.