As with "The Lovely Bones," "The Almost Moon" delivers its most dramatic news straight out of the gate. "When all is said and done," 49-year-old Helen Knightly tells us in her opening sentence, "killing my mother came easily." So we have a matricidal narrator this time around, a corpse who's almost as much trouble dead as she was alive, and no little-girl promises of a sweetly imagined afterlife - just the torment and regret and stunningly rendered memories of a lifetime of trouble.
Advance notices of "The Almost Moon" have tended to carry a caveat, suggesting that Sebold's topic is too unrelentingly grim to promise the sort of reception that "The Lovely Bones" warranted. For my money it's a better novel. It's brilliantly paced, it's brutally honest, and the Gordian knot at its core - an abusive mother and her traumatically attached daughter - is depicted with such generous intelligence that the fineness of the novel more than surpasses its own horror show of circumstance. Sebold has managed to give us a sympathetic protagonist who smothers her mother in the opening pages, and yet the decades that led up to this black moment are delivered without a shred of sentimentality or melodramatic overkill. It's a tightrope walk of character building: Helen is funny, tough, and utterly trustworthy as a narrator; her mother is equal parts demonic and pathetic - she's Livia Soprano, ruining her child's life as she rules over her court of gloom. And worse.
