The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold, author of The Lovely Bones, is one of the most disturbing books I’ve read in a long time. Sebold is a gifted writer who choses difficult subject matter to explore. Her writing can be compelling and absorbing, but her gifts were lost here, as there was so little to redeem this novel.

The novel opens with Helen Knightly murdering her mother, who suffers from demention, and it spirals down from there into even more and more disturbing events. There were no characters or stories to care about here, and this is where the novel truly failed.

I didn’t feel so much that the subject of mental illness was explored, as I felt Sebold was trying to wrench out the readers insides and stomp on them-not a good feeling at all. I will leave it at that.