Volume 54, Number 17 · November 8, 2007
Mommie Dearest
By Jennifer Schuessler
The Almost Moon
by Alice Sebold
Little, Brown, 291 pp., $24.99
The Almost Moon, Alice Sebold's second novel, is the story of a mother-daughter hate affair. The daughter in question is Helen Knightly, a forty-nine-year-old divorced mother of two who works as a nude artist's model at a college in a depressed area in central Pennsylvania. Her eighty-eight-year-old mother, who lives nearby in the old family house, is deep into dementia but hasn't lost her spunk. A passage of dialogue—the first words exchanged between the two women—gives a hint of the emotional weather, and Sebold's stylized approach to depicting it:
Review, 1659 words
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