Review of Almost Moon by Alice Sebold; Back Bay Books / Little, Brown and Company, New York, NY: 2007.

My sister lent me this book as something I should read. I haven’t read any of Alice Sebold’s other books (Lovely Bones & Lucky), but now I think I shall.

Almost Moon begins relatively simple. Middle-aged single daughter, Helen, cares for her aging mother. The mother, as we learn is suffering from Dementia, and probably a host of other mental illnesses. Helen narrates through the struggles of caring for someone so close, so troubled.

She takes on this task of her mother mostly alone. She is the only child of her parents. Once a day, Mrs. Castle checked on Helen’s mother, brought her flowers from her garden and food from her kitchen. Helen makes it clear that Mrs. Castle does this only to ensure that her mother has woken each day and is still alive.

Helen finds herself going through routines with her mother, rout from a mother-daughter obligation. During these mundane visits, Helen flashes back to memories of her mother when she was a child, when her children were grandchildren, and even when her mother had the chances to interact with the great-grandchildren.

I picked the book up to read one night before bed. The pages flipped by. I thought I might get through a good chunk of it in one sitting. Then the first chapter ended. And it ended hard.

The book sat on my nightstand for quite a few nights. Alone.

Finally, I felt able to open it up again. I reread the last paragraph of the first chapter to make sure I had read it right. I did. It took a few pages into the second chapter to get back in the groove of Helen’s voice, but once I did, the pages flipped by again.

Helen takes the reader on a journey. It is a familiar journey between the intricacies of our kinship relationships and the outside world. Sebold sucks us into Helen’s vacuum in which the relationships with her daughters are all that matter, and the memories of her parents are all she can think about.

Mid-way through the book, Helen reflects on her father explaining her mother to her. He uses the moon as an example, and how it’s always there, but not always seen in full. Sebold has her title and Helen accepts that her mother will always be there, seen or unseen.

The book continues to weave Helen’s struggle with what she’s done and how to continue the life she knew. I yearned for her to make the right decisions from this point out, but Helen can’t see right from wrong anymore. Her view is jaded by her actions, her motivations, and her reasoning.

In the end, I felt like there would be more of an end. However, like her mother, and like the moon, Helen develops almost full circle. I closed the book with great satisfaction.

Review of "Room" by Emily Donoghue, Hachette Audio: 2010

Laundry. Firehouse. Email. The list of things I need to do tonight. As I repeated this list aloud, I noticed the rhythm of it. It’s simple and absolute. The process of jumping from one to the next doesn’t allow for questions of what if, how, when.

Then I realized why it seemed so familiar. The rhythm caught in my head was that of a popular cartoon character, Dora. I have watched children I babysit grow up to her. They thrive on her audience interaction. Just last week, a child I have known since his birth was answering her back and telling me all the answers she asked. At three years of age, it was the first time I have seen him so active with the show. (After the show, we even acted out parts of the episode.)

Emily Donoghue also writes about a boy in love with Dora. Her boy, Jack, is trapped in a room with his mother. He has spent his whole life here. The room measures 11’ x 11’ and has the bare necessities. Old Man Nick has kept them here Jack’s entire life. To Jack, this is the world.

Despite being surrounded by four encasing walls, Jack’s mother finds the strength to make his world all it can be and more. Old Man Nick allows them a television by which Jack watches the TV people. Through this portal Jack befriends Dora among others.

Without knowing any humans other than his mother (he hides when Old Man Nick is around), Jack relies on his television friends to carry him through. His mother relies on him to carry her through. She continues to live everyday because of Jack. They escape daily in his young, wild imagination and her want of normalcy.

They have their rituals to help knock down their walls. They eat and pray. They play physical games, like track and corpse, and read endlessly, like Alice in Wonderland again and again. His mother uses Jack’s comfort with ritual and love of Dora to aid them in their escape.

During their attempted escape, Jack constantly falls back to his repetition. One word each, one word at a time. I won’t tell you the words, nor if they escape as not to spoil it. However, the repetition, the rhythm gives him comfort. It is what holds him together when his mother can’t.

It is great for Jack, or any of us to have this abstract to fall back on. It is like having your favorite stuffed animal, blanket, or remote with you at the hardest times. When the world changes and the walls come down Jack catatonically repeats his words, counts his teeth, and takes in the stories and surroundings.

With the mind occupied the eyes can take in the necessary and leave the rest to guess. Questions don’t have time to form and we search for the familiar things, like Sunday Treat. We rely on the rhythm to keep our world absolute and simple. For it is when the repetition stops we feel like we are bumping around in the back of a pickup traveling down a country road. At any second we could fall out. Especially if the driver stops quick…