Shake your bon-bon (Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons - Lorna Landvik)

Member Name: gaultier100

Product:	Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons - Lorna Landvik
Date:	09/09/04 (276 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Beautifully written, Great characters, Emotional and heart-wrenching

Disadvantages: none - read this book!

To say I didn't quite know what to expect when I started reading this book is an understatement. A gift from a friend, it had a surprising unfathomable title that gave away no clues as to what lay inside. While I know you're never meant to judge a book by its cover, I did and so, that meant that when I finally started reading it I was even more intrigued that I think I would've been.

Set in Minneapolis, AHEB is essentially a tale of five women who live in the same sleepy neighbourhood who end up forming a reading group which is dubbed by their husbands as angry housewives just sitting around and eating bon-bons. However they are anything but and each have their own secrets - one has a disturbing past with her drunkard unloving mother and so invents a new past to hide her shame. One has a husband who beats her while one has a psychic ability to discover when things are happening, like her husband's affair. The other longs for a baby and adopts her niece's unwanted child, while the other is a staunch human rights protester yet all is not well in her family or even sometimes in her heart. Together these intricate, well-described characters create a bond together in which it is them against the world, learning more about each other through the ages - from the 60s to the 90s.

What makes this book so special though is that it isn't just some uninspiring chick-lit about love life and friendship but its themes run much deeper than that. Besides the loveable nature of the characters and inevitable desire to be one of them, despite identifying more readily with another, there is also stark reality in the story. The character who gets beaten by her husband for example, describes in detail why she puts up with the abuse and also, her small revenges for the frequent beatings and oppression. One particularly graphic part is when the brother of one comes to stay after serving in the Vietnam War. A shadow of his former self, he hasn't,
up until now, spoken about what actually happened out there. He goes on to describe in graphic detail an incident which now only saddened my heart but made me feel physically sick about the atrocities of war. Yet that was just the tip of the iceberg.

What Landvik has so successfully created here is the feelings and emotions of friendship in all its beauty and similarly, its ugliness, which is easily part of the appeal. Life is not perfect and happy endings are the stuff of Disney movies. However, in this, a real feeling of identification is produced - the pain, the sorrow, the suffering, lined with the highs of life which make us all keep living. And that is what the book group is - a lifeline for all the women involved ? a place for them to be themselves, express their feelings and develop their identity beyond wife, mother and daughter.

This is a very special book and well worth a read if you're after something a little different and a bit more edgy than the neurotic chick-lit of today, with its strong, confident female characters and outspoken narrative. It is a journey through life and unapologetic in its themes. Curl up on a sofa, take the phone off the hook and delve into the past like never before.

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