Ms. Hen reviews The Almost Moon

The Almost Moon

Alice Sebold

Little, Brown and Company

2007

Ms. Hen decided to read this novel because she picked it up at a Little Free Library near where she lives before the time when she wouldn’t touch anything for fear of illness. She had read THE LOVELY BONES by this author years ago, and when she found this book, she read the first line and it intrigued her. It is, “When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.” Who could not be fascinated by a line like this? Ms. Hen was hooked.

This novel is about a woman, Helen, who kills her mother in a heat of passion, and spends the next twenty-four hours thinking about her life and what is has come to. She is divorced and has two grown daughters who live far away, and she kept living near her mother in order to take care of her. Her mother was mentally ill, and was agoraphobic, and never left the house for years. He father committed suicide. Her ex-husband is an artist, and she was his model, and afterwards, she became a model at the college near where she lived.

One of Ms. Hen’s problems with this novel is that all the characters seem like they’re not very nice people. They have a way of talking to each other that sounds like they should be living in a sitcom like ROSEANNE or THE MIDDLE, a chirpy, screaming way of conversation that Ms. Hen found she couldn’t stand. It’s not that Ms. Hen thought that Helen was wrong to kill her mother; in fact, she thought she had good reason to do so, but she thinks that Helen didn’t go about it the right way, that she could have gotten away with it if she wasn’t so stupid. All the characters in this novel don’t seem very intelligent to Ms. Hen.

Another aspect of this novel that Ms. Hen didn’t like is the ending. The reader never learns what happens to Helen. Ms. Hen can appreciate an ambiguous ending in a short story, because that’s a place where it’s okay for an ending like that, but after we spend almost three hundred pages following Helen around trying to find out what will happen to her, we never find out! There is no ending! Ms. Hen hated this. She wanted to know. She understands this could be a literary technique, but she thinks it’s cheap, and it’s cheating the reader.

Ms. Hen read this novel fast, not because she thought it was good, but because she wanted to find out what happened to Helen, and then she never found out! Ms. Hen does not recommend this novel. You should read something else.