The Almost Moon

Critical Praise

"Sebold's unblinking authorial gaze is her hallmark: where lesser writers would turn away from things too horrible to see or feel or admit, her scrutiny never wavers." — Lev Grossman, Time

“Advance notices of THE ALMOST MOON have tended to carry a caveat, suggesting that Sebold's topic is too unrelentingly grim to promise the sort of reception that The Lovely Bones warranted. For my money it's a better novel. It's brilliantly paced, it's brutally honest, and the Gordian knot at its core - an abusive mother and her traumatically attached daughter - is depicted with such generous intelligence that the fineness of the novel more than surpasses its own horror show of circumstance.” — Boston Globe

“Sebold can still write beautiful, haunting scenes.” — Washington Post Book World

“Compulsively readable.” — People

“It is indisputably a good thing when writing is so vivid it causes physical reactions. . . . [Sebold’s] willingness to pry into the darker aspects of human consciousness is what's important.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review

“From the opening line of THE ALMOST MOON . . . we recognize Alice Sebold's hand: her sensuous yet impeccably direct language, her world where the poignant and the gruesome intertwine.” — Houston Chronicle

“One couldn't ask for a more candid, updated, locally savvy Dostoyevsky. . . . No disappointment here. Sebold, who grew up in Paoli, may be our true heiress to Poe . . . a novelist who dares to write honestly about the banality of violence, and about how it lives next door to normalcy, in a mist." — Philadelphia Inquirer

“Alice Sebold has an uncanny knack for imaginatively entering the bleakest of situations and finding a kind of normalcy there. . . . It is a sure sign of Sebold’s gifts as a writer that Helen is gutsy and sympathetic even when pushed to the edges of sanity.” — O magazine

“Book clubs, take notice: practically every paragraph is a talking point.” —Newsweek

“Think the living-room tragedy of Long Day’s Journey Into Night fused with the sunny, surly, dark-funny domesticity of Six Feet Under.” — New York magazine

“Five years after the release of The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold returns with her second novel, an equally haunting narrative about the complexity of the mother-daughter relationship.” — Woman's Day

“Sebold’s fixation on terror retains its hold.” — New Yorker

“. . . you realize that rather than having slipped as an observer down a rabbit hole into a world of crazies, perhaps Sebold has just turned things upside down so that the rabbit hole leads right back to the reality we're already living in. Along with its buoying dark wit, it is this eerily familiar blurred line between sane and insane that makes THE ALMOST MOON simultaneously uncomfortable and absorbing.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“When Sebold has readers in hand like this . . . the author twists just a bit further, a bit harder, to reveal helplessly somber moments of the human heart. That readers will not know they are entering into such shadows until they are already there is the book's genius and its peril.” — St. Louis Post-Dispatch

“[THE ALMOST MOON] has intensity and a page-turning quality. Readers of this book are likely to be discussing it for a long time.” — Seattle Times “A dark, masterful contrast to her essentially sunny crowd-pleaser, The Lovely Bones . . . The material is risky and exciting and refreshingly new. Whether readers sympathize with poor Helen or not, all but the squeamish will fall in and follow her to the end.” — Chicago Sun-Times

“THE ALMOST MOON is a breathless read, a dark literary thriller that delves into the psychology of mother-daughter relationships and the fallout of mental illness. It is neither a sequel to The Lovely Bones nor a replica; instead, it ventures into startling new territory.” — Rocky Mountain News

“Those who stick with it will be rewarded with staggering insight into human emotions and actions, even those that seem most unexplainable.” — Dallas Morning News

"Alice Sebold is not just talented but very bold.” — Arizona Republic

"It's a strange, wild, even hysterical book: visceral, black and unguarded, and there were moments when I wondered if Sebold had gone too far. But my God, it grips....I lay awake half the night, feverishly hoping both that it would never end, and that it would all be over soon.” — London Evening Standard

"THE ALMOST MOON is a brash, intricate novel as elegantly written as (Sebold's) first." — Newark Star Ledger