From NY Times Book Review
“When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily.” That’s the first sentence of Alice Sebold’s new novel, which follows her best-selling “Lovely Bones,” the story of the rape and murder of a girl who tells her tale from beyond the grave. “The Lovely Bones” was Sebold’s second book. Her first was an account of her own rape, a memoir wryly titled “Lucky.”

“The Almost Moon” matches those early books in acts of violence. Not only does the novel’s narrator — a professional art-class model named Helen Knightly, the divorced mother of two grown children — murder her mother in graphic fashion, but she also describes her father’s bloody suicide, relates the story of the hit-and-run killing of a young boy and eerily alludes to the time her mother dropped Helen’s infant grandson on his head.

You have to be in awe of that first sentence, though. Dostoyevsky had to write hundreds of pages before getting to the act of patricide in “The Brothers Karamazov.” It took Oedipus two whole plays to realize he had killed his father and to “work his way through it,” as we would say, so he could

She isn’t being arch, in case you were wondering. “The Almost Moon” doesn’t waste our time with dark irony winding itself around complex psychology, à la Humbert Humbert, who described his own mother’s death with a parenthetical indifference verging on happy relief in Nabokov’s tediously multilayered novel. Sebold may not be as dreadfully earnest as Sophocles and Dostoyevsky, but she is sincere.

Very much so. After suffocating her mother, which also involves breaking her nose, Helen tells us she “thought of the uncared-for bodies that lay strewn in the streets and fields of Rwanda or Afghanistan. I thought of the thousands of sons and daughters who would like to be in the position I was in. To have known exactly when their mothers died, and then to be alone with their bodies before the world rushed in.” Though she has just killed her mother, Helen is a generous person. She never forgets that other people are suffering and dying too.

In “The Almost Moon,” Sebold is out to lasso some big ideas about the relationship between parents and children, especially mothers and daughters. Murdering her mother — who, we learn, was mentally ill and had colon and breast cancer — inspires Helen to ruminate on her parents; her failures as a wife and friend; her reasons for having sex, right after the murder, with her best friend’s son; and her life as an art-school model. (“Having lost all shyness by having spent my career taking off my clothes in public,” she thinks, relaxing with a good, hot shower just hours after asphyxiating her mother, “I enjoyed how demure the steam made me seem.”)

The book’s title refers to something her father once told Helen when she was a girl. “The moon is whole all the time, but we can’t always see it. What we see is an almost moon or a not-quite moon. ... We plan our lives based on its rhythms and tides.” Later, Helen connects this to a big idea about her relationship with her mother: “The idea that my mother was eternal like the moon. ... Dead or alive, a mother or the lack of a mother shaped one’s whole life.”

find terrible redemption at Colonus. But in “The Almost Moon,” right there at the get-go, at the beginning of the long journey that will take her from the motivations for committing her unspeakable crime to some sense of “closure,” Helen is, you know, cool with murdering her mother.