I’ve read things from Alice Sebold before and I must say I was really confused when I found this book in the charity bin in my local bookstore. I quickly picked it up and took it home. It started off amazingly but about half way through it lost direction and towards the end I understood why it was in the bin.

What an amazing book it could have been! A story of love and hate between a child and her mother. About the difficult relationships between parents and mental health struggles. About agoraphobia and about love.

Instead, it gets derailed into this mess – a murder and a cover-up, the involving of an ex husband who didn’t have anything to do with the murder, bringing in more innocents into a story that wasn’t theirs to begin with.

I’m still rating it a solid 3/5 purely due to how nice the first half of the book was.

Also by Alice Sebold: The Lovely Bones and Excerpt about death.

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When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.

A woman steps over the line into the unthinkable in this brilliant, powerful and unforgettable novel by the author of The Lovely Bones.

For years, Helen Knightly has given her life to others: to her haunted mother, to her enigmatic father, to her husband and now-grown daughters. When she finally crosses a terrible boundary, her life comes rushing in at her in a way she never could have imagined.

Unfolding over twenty-four hours, The Almost Moon explores the ties between mothers and daughters, wives and lovers, the meaning of devotion and the line between love and hate. It is a challenging, moving, gripping story, written with the humanity and fluidity that only Alice Sebold can bring to the page.

So what did I like about the book? I loved the premise: that in your love of your parent, in order to end their mindless suffering, you would perform the ultimate sin against God: matricide. But as the story unfolds, we find out it’s more about seeing your parents age. Understanding that when your father went away for two months it was actually him being committed into a mental institution. Depression and anxiety rule the book.

“She looked up at me and smiled. ‘Bitch,’ she said. The thing about dementia is that sometimes you feel like the afflicted person has a trip wire to the truth, as if they can see beneath the skin you hide in.”

What I didn’t like so much was her erratic behaviour post-suffocating her mother to death. I understand washing her shit-stained body but why cut her hair only to later flush it down the toilet? It’s something a serial killer would do – get a something to remember the victim by.

And why sleep with her best-friend’s son? It’s slightly incestuous thinking about it as their kids grew up together and the son is the same age as her daughter.

And why drag in her ex that divorced her over 10 years ago?

And why go back to the murder scene only to break in into their neighbour’s house to watch the police search for her.

Boo.