[.ca] Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons (ISBN 0345442822)

Loved this book:
I really loved this book. I laughed and cried and when I was finished reading, I felt like I had been a part of such a wonderful world. I really wanted the characters to be part of my book club (and also wished they were neighbors!) I loved the different narrators and subplots and how it covered 30 years of time so effortlessly. It was so interesting to learn about the different characters through their own story, then through other eyes as well. Can't wait for Landvik's next book!! I also wanted to recommend another book that was similar in structure to this one: A SECRET WORD. Everyone in my book club loved it and the reading group guide and author Q & A were especially helpful.

If you loved . . .:
A very enjoyable read and we should all have friends like this that span the ages...I could see my mother and her friends in these women and I can only hope that will be me...A heartwarming tale and a very interesting presentation...I have shared my copy with several people...it was a big hit at our book club as well! We all enjoyed it! If you have to pick two books to read, make one of them ANGRY HOUSEWIVES and the other THE CHILDREN'S CORNER by McCrae. You can't go wrong with either.

Her others are better:
I love all her books, except this one. It is a great premise, it just needs unity. Maybe like the previous person said, it probably just needed some additional editing to make it as good as her others. Knowing that she can do better, I am looking forward to her next book.

A fun and fast read!:
Very entertaining. I am looking forward to more by this author.

30 years of bon bons and books:
Angry Housewives Eating Bon-Bons is the sort of tale that makes you laugh out loud, cry (repeatedly), reminisce, and feel privileged to be invited along for the ride. The story of five women on a cul-de-sac in Minneapolis, Minnesota, their adventures, their confessions, and their joys made me want to be part of their book club, their neighborhood, their lives. Narrated in turn by each of the five, while the other four weave in and out of each chapter, AHEB covers 30 years' worth of book club meetings, and incidentally, their raising their children to adulthood. Each woman has traits to admire and to recoil from; most of us will identify with at least one of them. Motherly Kari (who has no child), Confident Audrey (sex on the brain, all the time), Terrified Merit (the beauty without power who rebels quietly), Indomitable Slip (small but powerful), Secretive Faith (whose casual lies keep all from knowing who she really is). Typical readers of the genre will find at least one to identify with and use the others as foils. We get to know all of them well enough to care. It's not the emptiness of "chick lit" but it's not canonical either; this is 99.44% pure middlebrow. The housewives are upper-middle-class moms who are affected by cultural changes despite their priveleged place; by the early nineties all of them have returned to work. Some of the book is overly formulaic; by setting each chapter as a book club meeting, the author clearly used best-seller lists through the last 30 years. Would such a book club always be ahead, or even on, that curve? The sixties and early seventies seem more accurately researched and presented than the later seventies through early nineties; there was little sense of emotional presence or changed times in those chapters. Think about all the little things we can't live without now that weren't there in 1985, like drive-through espresso or cell phones or the Internet (which earns a very brief mention at the end); it's hard to tell 1978 from 1998 in this book other than the kids getting older. This novel is reminiscent of similar group histories such as How to Make an American Quilt by way of Marilyn French's The Women's Room. While it is unfair to characterize the women of AHEB as merely a book club (since they all live on the same street, they are a community first and foremost), using literature as history is an interesting device. The little snips of each woman's lives around the monthly meetings are taken in like a box of bon-bons: sweet, enjoyable, yet too much of it may not be that good for you. by Maddi Hausmann Sojourner, 15 July 2004