Alice Sebold has a brilliant gift for story telling. The author of three national bestsellers, including the Lovely Bones, does, like so few contemporaries around her fuse the imagination of a child––that fluidity between bright shining possibilities and the happy memories of desserts for snacktime––with the haunting realities of the adult psyche, which is, without a doubt, always reeling out of control. In Lovely Bones, she entrusts us with peace and teaches us how to heal.In Almost Moon, Sebold offers us a soul, generated out of nothing––utterly mascerated and singularly beautiful. Sebold mixes poetry with Poe, the azure blue of an un-biased sky with the deep red of murder and rape. She is poignant in a way that is both readily philosophical and at the same time, hitting disturbingly too close to our own sentiments... at that one time... ages and ages ago.
Sebold captures you with the first line of "The Almost Moon:" ––sweeping you off your feet into a tale whose language is wrapped in warmth and genteel while writhing beneath the scars of the deepest, most familiar pain––
"When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily."
I will recommend to no end for anyone to travel into the post-mortem life of Susan Salmon and discover the missing boundaries between the living and the dead, and between grieving and forgetting. Or, I invite you to journey through the perilously raw heart and will of Helen Knightly whose murder of her mother leaves the reader's morality just as rigorously flayed as her own.
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