If you welcome the unreal disjunction between killing your mother and reflecting afterward how lucky you are compared with the children of the dead, “uncared for” mothers in Rwanda and Afghanistan, then this book will make you clap your hands with joy. If you find the idea that mothers shape their children’s “whole” lives original rather than simultaneously banal and puerilely overstated, then Barnes & Noble, here you come! This novel is so morally, emotionally and intellectually incoherent that it’s bound to become a best seller.

...in The Lovely Bones the victim is young and innocent and the killer serial; in The Almost Moon the victim is old and hurtful, the killer barely a murderer at all. There's a similar alertness to the ways in which everyone's a victim and everyone has murderous feelings, and outlandish acts again come out of a need to love and feel loved.... The excess of craziness means we don't have, paradoxically, an intimate sense of what Helen is like: she's sardonic, practical, controlled - but then none of those things, just her crazy parents' daughter.

Sebold has an Olympic pole-vaulter’s instinct for going over the top; occasionally my eyes were rolling so hard I had to hold the book directly over my head to keep reading... Part of The Almost Moon’s diminished power might be that, since (and partly because of) the wild success of The Lovely Bones, this genre—the American suburban gothic family dysfunction saga—has become even more of a tired pop-cultural reflex than it was before.

Sebold reveals the family's fractured past (insane, agoraphobic mother; tormented father, dead by suicide) and creates a portrait of Clair that resembles Sebold's own mother as portrayed in her memoir, Lucky . While Helen has clearly suffered at her mother's hands, the matricide is woefully contrived, and Helen's handling of the body and her subsequent actions seem almost slapstick. Sebold can write, that's clear, but her sophomore effort is not in line with her talent.