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A review by thewallflower00
The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold
1.0
My wife recently joined a book club. This is one of the books that was on the list. And me, being the curious sort, read it too. After all this science fiction and fantasy, it's nice to see how the other world lives. What do you read on the literary side of the fence?
It turns out you read Lifetime movies. This is the same author who wrote "The Lovely Bones", which apparently was some kind of phenomenon. I should not have started with her sophomore effort. This is a scatter-brained novel. It reminds me of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall", which is the short story we all had to read in literature class when we learned about modern American literature and stream-of-consciousness -- techniques which are no longer used at all. And there's a reason. It sucks. It's incoherent to read. It's repetitive. And it does not add value to the plot.
The story takes place over 24 hours, as a woman who's just mercy-killed her mother, who was suffering from dementia and agoraphobia and generally became a nutjob who was making everyone's life miserable. Then we follow her around as the makes even more poor life decisions, like having sex with the 30-year-old son of her best friend, calling her ex-husband up from two states away, running away from the cops, lying to them. And interspersed in all these scenes are unreliable glimpses from her past, like her dad hiding in the attic from her mother, her dad committing suicide (or did he?), and scenes that just prove her mom was a douchebag and deserved to die a long time ago. In fact, I don't think the world would be so bad off if a lot of the characters in the book died. Skip this one.
It turns out you read Lifetime movies. This is the same author who wrote "The Lovely Bones", which apparently was some kind of phenomenon. I should not have started with her sophomore effort. This is a scatter-brained novel. It reminds me of "The Jilting of Granny Weatherall", which is the short story we all had to read in literature class when we learned about modern American literature and stream-of-consciousness -- techniques which are no longer used at all. And there's a reason. It sucks. It's incoherent to read. It's repetitive. And it does not add value to the plot.
The story takes place over 24 hours, as a woman who's just mercy-killed her mother, who was suffering from dementia and agoraphobia and generally became a nutjob who was making everyone's life miserable. Then we follow her around as the makes even more poor life decisions, like having sex with the 30-year-old son of her best friend, calling her ex-husband up from two states away, running away from the cops, lying to them. And interspersed in all these scenes are unreliable glimpses from her past, like her dad hiding in the attic from her mother, her dad committing suicide (or did he?), and scenes that just prove her mom was a douchebag and deserved to die a long time ago. In fact, I don't think the world would be so bad off if a lot of the characters in the book died. Skip this one.