Alice Sebold’s first novel, The Lovely Bones, made a huge splash when it became an instant international bestseller. In that book, a little girl watches from heaven as the events following her rape and murder swallow her family and friends below.
It seemed a very bold thing to do, I thought: to have the voice of the dead victim leading the reader through such a hideous crime and the awful years that follow. Yet Alice Sebold pulled it off in the most page-turning fashion.
In this book, the story is again one of boldness, and the subject matter also has an “eek” factor. Helen Knightly is a 49-year-old divorced mother of two grown-up girls. And in the first sentence of the book, she confesses to murdering her elderly mother. She doesn’t mean to, not up until the last minute, but she has dreamed of doing it all her life. Such is the complicated twist of their relationship.
over the next 24 hours, as Helen drags her mother’s body to the basement, calls on her long-lost ex-husband, betrays her best friend, and works out whether to run and hide or stay and face the music, she recounts the chunks of her past that add up to make her the sort of woman who murders her mum.
In some ways, she can’t be entirely blamed. The old biddy would try the patience of a saint. But I’m sure a lot of women dream of murdering their mothers so why does Helen move on to the next lethal stage?
This will not be everybody’s cup of tea because at the beginning it is hard to understand why Helen is acting like such an incredible loony. But as the details of a life spent with two mentally unstable parents leak out over the duration of the book, as she staggers through the aftermath of a rash and fatal decision, I felt my sympathy for this odd, lonely character building.
Although I felt a bit queasy around page 69, I kept going and finished it in one hit. I may be wrong, but I get the feeling Alice Sebold writes exactly what she wants to write, not what others want to read, and this edge will have me turning the pages of her next novel just as quickly as I have the last two.
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