All said and done

It was tough to read Lovely Bones, which told the story of a raped and murdered 14-year-old girl who looks down from heaven as her death remains unsolved, and I didn't read beyond the first few pages when I had picked it up at the public library in 2005.

Well... Alice Sebold delivers an equally tough and bleak story in her latest novel, The Almost Moon, which begins:

"When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily"

.... which is what the protagonist of the novel, Helen Knightly says after smothering to death her 88-year-old mother, suffering from dementia, on the patio behind her home. And what perhaps makes it disturbing (based on my reading the link above) is that..

Helen's is not a freak crime of malicious intent, nor even a loving attempt to put her mother out of a degrading misery. It is a fantasy of revenge, acted out. "Once begun," Helen says, "I did not stop. She struggled, her blue-veined hands, with the rings she feared would be stolen if she ever took them off, grabbed at my arms...I held the towels for a long time, staring right at her, until I felt the tip of her nose snap and saw the muscles of her body go suddenly slack and knew that she had died."

Read another review of the book at the Village Voice.