(My full review of this book is much longer than GoodReads' word-count limitations. Find the entire essay at the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com].)

I freely admit it; that as a man, there are sometimes things that women do that utterly baffle me, and will probably continue to baffle me until the day I freaking die, just like it is with women regarding men. And that's because, avoiding any kind of qualitative judgment, I think we can all agree that there are fundamentally different ways that men and women sometimes react in different situations, based on a variety of criteria and societal concerns, and that in some cases such actions and behaviors can seem incomprehensible to the other gender. You don't hear of too many men, for example, who just lose their marbles one day, drive their kids to a nearby lake and calmly drown them; not too many male jilted lovers go on insane cross-country drives in the middle of the night, with bizarre weapons in tow and while wearing adult diapers so that they don't have to make bathroom breaks, all in the name of some crazed crackpot scheme thought up in the middle of the night regarding stabbing their lover's new lover then turning the knife on themselves.

It is one of these very topics, in fact, that fuels the entire storyline of acclaimed author Alice Sebold's latest brilliantly twisted dark little novel, The Almost Moon; in fact, that's what the very first chapter of the book is devoted to, is a real-time blow-by-blow accounting of a middle-aged woman suddenly going insane one day and murdering her senile, sh-t-covered old-age mother, just randomly one afternoon while over at her house and preparing to clean her like a baby for the thousandth time in a row now. What the rest of this delightfully wicked story is about, then, is a fascinating and detailed look at the decades leading up to this moment, told in a non-narrative "hyperfiction" style that jumps from early-childhood to just yesterday at the blink of an eye, painting one of the deepest portraits you'll see in contemporary literature of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship, and of all the teeny, tiny, strange, entertaining, depressing, hopeless, fascinating ways the relationship affects the way the woman deals with each and every other person in her life too. It is utterly a female story, the kind that can only be told by a female author, but told in a way so that I as a male reader can get it too; I love such novels, as I've mentioned here before, and am always glad to come upon another one like I have this week.

So why does Sebold's name sound so familiar, you're thinking? Well, because she's the mousy dark novelist who seemingly appeared out of nowhere in the early 2000s to write The Lovely Bones, an emotionally devastating crime thriller and meditation on loss that happened to have been written from the standpoint of a murdered teenage girl as she watches the proceedings from heaven. I read it too when it first came out, and like many others it made me openly weep in public; it became not only a runaway bestseller, but is also slated to be the next movie by Lord of the Rings impresario Peter Jackson. Oh yeah, that Alice Sebold!

This is only her second novel, after taking a break between them to pen the true rape memoir Lucky; and it is the best kind of second novel to write, to tell you the truth, one that...