The almost moon is written by Alice Sebold, who has also written the lovely bones which is one of the books I immensely enjoyed reading.
In this novel we follow a woman name Helen Knightly and the book opens with her telling us that she had killed her mother. Her mother’s name is Claire and Helen is in-charge of taking care of her mother because there is no one else to do it.
Her father is dead, she doesn’t have any siblings and as the story unfolds we realizes why Helen is pushed to kill her mother. Helen’s mother had dementia on top of a lot of other problems that were apparent since Helen was little, but didn’t understand as a problem and they thought this is something every parent has to deal with.
This novel takes place within a period of 24 hours, so everything is based off this one movement when Helen killed her mother and how she will deal with it and now she thinks she has to deal with her for the rest of her life. The novel starts off really intensely because you have a couple of chapters of her describing how this murder took place and then the psychological aspect of it which really starts to kick in and then it gets slow and I think this is where this novel looses a lot of people. However, it does pick up at the end and it really starts to grab the reader as it had done in the starting few pages.
Helen had a lot of time to sit on this dark side of things and to ponder on all this that took place, so it was a bit appropriate that we had slow movements in this novel, but it doesn’t make for a thrilling read but it does make it a dark and psychological novel. The question that really comes down to in this book is who you would sympathize with. I will recommend this novel to someone who doesn’t mind a slow boil, a dark storyline and some of the psychological stuff, but it I will definitely not going to appeal to a wide audience.