First Runner-Up in the 2008 Delete Key Awards: Alice Sebold’s ‘The Almost Moon’

And the first-runner up in the 2008 Delete Key Awards contest is …

“And there it was, the hole that had given birth to me.…This was not the first time I’d been face-to-face with my mother’s genitalia.”
— From Alice Sebold’s The Almost Moon (Little, Brown)

Is it overkill to recognize bad writing in novel that’s already been named one of the five worst books of 2007 by Entertainment Weekly www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20167009_3,00.html and that received a “Stinker of the Year” tag from New York magazine
nymag.com/arts/cultureawards/2007/41801/index2.html?
Not when the book has a lot more like writing like this. (“Face-to-face” isn’t quite the right phrase for those body parts, does it?) And the novel set itself apart from the other finalists with more than what a visitor to this site called “the ‘ick’ factor.”

Last year’s first runner-up, Mitch Albom’s For One More Day, is written at a third-grade reading level (Grade 3.4) according to the readability statistics that come with the spell-checker on Microsoft Word. The Almost Moon barely rises above it with a level of Grade 4.7 and exemplifies the bizarre trend toward writing about adult subjects in prose fit for the Island Princess Barbie set. What’s next: My First Book of the Kama Sutra? Or Let’s Read and Find Out About S&M?

© 2008 Janice Harayda. All rights reserved.
www.janiceharayda.com