A Tragic but touching book!!. Review on Almost Moon, The - Alice Sebold

If ever there was a school in English Literature called the Tragedy School, this haunting book will come out from it in first class honors. This book sets new standards of tragic authoring. It opens with a haunting opening line where the narrator admits happiness and relief by killing her own mother. If this opening was not bad enough, the reader is taken through a gruesome account of how people are wasted away by Dementia. By the time the chapter closes and the narrator kills her mother, one can only sympathize the narrator's act as euthanasia.

Happiness does not come to the author. Tragedy and grief seems to stick to her like glue. Totally disregarding the fact that to the police, her act was murder, she cleaned her mother, bathed her and clothed her. The narrator's name was Helen. She called her ex-husband Jake to share with someone else what she had just done. Jake tries to talk some sense into her, else she would have been rendered insane by her toxic past memories and drowned her readers with her in an impossible web of tragedy and disappointment. We infer from her series of memories that she had two daughters Emily and Sarah, her father had committed suicide but was very close to her and both she and her father watched the slow decay in her mother's life, wherein she refused to step out of her home after 40 while she lived on to be close to 90. Her mother even refused to help a young boy hit in an accident, not comprehending the entire incident. This made her a target of hate in the neighborhood and Helen had to bear the brunt of their fury.

In a crazy night of desperation, she makes love with her best friend's son and drives around a deserted town. There is a hint of sunlight when Jake enters the scene but soon he is as much on the run from police as she is, because he had gone into her mother's room. Natalie is also furious with Helen for her irresponsible act the night before.Ultimately, Helen decides it was not fair for her loved ones to suffer because of her. She borrows Hamish's car- her best friend's son- and goes back to an apartment opposite her mother's, which was now sealed by the police. Something changes her heart after writing to Emily and confessing her sins and she returns to await justice rather than blow up her brains.

The best part of the Novel is Helen explaining why the title almost moon fitted their lives- she, her dad and specially, her mom. This book is for the art house lovers. Go for it!