Good read:

I've just finished reading The Almost Moon by Alice Sebold (another gift from my daughter for Christmas...). It was an interesting read. A good read. What stops me from declaring this a GREAT read is the somewhat unconventional way in which the story unfolds. Not that I'm against unconventional. No. It's that I found myself, in the early chapters, wishing it would "get on with it."

The story begins with a killer (no pun intended) opening first line (*warning: spoiler alert*): "When all is said and done, killing my mother came easily." I stopped, read the sentence out loud to my husband (we were on a plane), and read it (silently, to myself) again. The opening chapter continues from there, building, rolling, until Helen, the narrator, kills her mother. It's shocking, riveting. The kind of jolt that makes you sit up and take notice.

The next several chapters are about the past. Indeed, the bulk of the story is about the past; we surface for a moment or two of real-time story and then slip back into the past for long stretches of time. But it was in these initial few chapters, back in the past, where I found my interest beginning to wane. And while I realize this recounting of the past is so necessary -- the layers, the foundation, the building and unfolding is needed, crucial; it informs the narrator and the story -- I wished for a smidge more dwelling in the real-time now of the story.

It picked up for me midway through chapter 5 (69 pages in). My daughter's motto is you have to give a book 50 pages. So if you subtract 12 pages from chapter 1 (which don't count for my purposes here because they were terrifically engaging), you're left with 57. Right on target.

The rest of the novel is fast-paced, intense, engaging. The past swirls with the present, grabs the narrator (and the reader) by the throat, and doesn't let go. There's a deepness, a complexity in the narrator's relationship with her mother and father that I found intriguing, sickly fascinating and, ultimately, very moving.

The prose is wonderful: sophisticated, crisp, honest. Worth the read.

Great read:

I have just finished reading The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold and my reaction? Wow. I love, love, love it when I'm able to lose myself in a fictional world, when the characters are so real, so engaging, when the storyline is so compelling that I find myself dwelling on it even when I'm not reading it. Such was the case with The Lovely Bones.

I loved this. What I loved most was the idea of it, the story being told from the murdered child's POV, and how bits and pieces of "her heaven" were weaved in. Very creative. I have to say, also, that watching the gut-wrenching pain of a family struggling to deal with the horror and devastation of losing a child/sibling was tough. And gripping. What a testament to the author: it was so well done, the prose so delightful, so honest that I fell into the story, feeling what these characters felt, living their nightmare. The mom's pain, in particular, and how she dealt with it was rendered beautifully. That's not to say that the father's pain was any less; no, it was tender and just as painful. But there was something about the way the mother handled it -- being numb, avoiding it, never looking directly at it, running away physically, long after she'd left emotionally, coming back 7 years later to finally, tenuously, begin to heal -- that felt so real, like how I might react. So unbearable and yet you must go on.

I thought the reunion with Ray was masterful.

This was a great read. Very poignant, very moving in all the best ways.

Have you read it?