Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons

I have to say that at first I was not totally thrilled about the idea of this book even more so when reading the synopsis of it prior to buying it. I thought it was going to be one of those that was totally out of my usual reading genre and I was right on that score.

I dithered about starting the book when it first arrived and left it on the side for a while but then found myself without a book to read. It did draw me in from the off but only in a “well at least it is readable” manner! I couldn’t get past the idea that it is a very formulaic book and wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that the author probably went on a “how to write a novel” course.

There was an older, widowed woman -Kari; a woman with a huge secret in her life – Faith; an abused woman – Merit; an extrovert – Audrey and a woman who wasn’t happy unless she was protesting or campaigning against some perceived wrong – Slip. The only thing missing from the line up was a lesbian!! This was rectified by introducing a couple of gay men and the constant allusion to Faith’s son possibly being homosexual.

The story covered the women over a period of 40 years which was, in my opinion, too long a time frame to fit into a novel of 512 pages and didn’t put enough flesh on the bones of the characters to bring them to life. There wasn’t enough time to develop depth of character for the women and their husbands and children were very much cameo characters except for Merit’s husband who was an abuser. Even here the author used an over used cliché by excusing his abusive nature with the reason that it was because he had been abused by his father and had seen his mother being abused by his father too. Sorry but there is no excuse possible for a wife or child beater!

All these women were depicted as intelligent and observant, so how come they didn’t pick up on the fact that Faith rarely mentioned her background? With Audrey being portrayed as being outspoken she would have ferreted out Faith’s “terrible dark secret” long before the end of the book! I think the only ‘true to life’ character was Merit who managed to conceal the fact of her beatings from the others but again truly observant people, and especially women, would have picked up on her behaviour and reactions to her husband. The children of these women all played together and sooner or later one or other of Merit’s daughters would have given the game away to the other children who would have made some remark to their parents.

I felt that the end of the novel was another let down – the author used too many statistics in her novel. Two out of every five get divorced; one out of every five suffer from cancer and so on. So which character to choose to have cancer? Lorna Landvik (author) chose Slip, wonder how she made that choice?

Audrey becoming a Minister??? Is that truly credible? I could, perhaps, believe her becoming a counsellor but not a minister.

The only part of this book that at first engendered any feeling and that of envy was the overall friendship that the women had and I did envy tha until I realised I do, in fact, have many friends. Sadly they are not all within reach for me to call and invite for coffee but nonetheless good friends and ones I would not be without 🙂

I keep my books and read them over and over again but I have already found this book a new home. I wouldn’t read it again and nor could I recommend it. Quite often I become quite engrossed in the books I read and empathise very much with the characters to the extent that I can laugh out loud at some antic and cry at sad parts but the only time I became upset with this novel was when the death of Kari’s dog was described!!

Apologies for such negativity regarding this book!

Leslie suggests we propose another book – so I put forward Nevil Shute’s ‘A Town Like Alice’ which is a classic but still widely available.

Lynn x