Rating: 
Summary: a MUST READ kinda of book!!!!
Review: I enjoyed this book from beginning to end. Begins and ends in the present, however this book goes back in time and follows the lives of 5 women neighbors and their close friendship through the decades. They form a book club and every chapter centers around a book selection. It's only March but it will be one of my top reads for 2003 already!
Rating: 
Summary: Not Landvik's Best
Review: I enjoyed this book, but it's not Ms. Landvik's best (see "Your Oasis on Flame Lake" for her best). I found the jumpy narrative a little distracting-- why did Audrey and Slip get to talk in first person while Merit, Faith and Kari were left to third person? Often times the book fell into cliched sterotypes and some of it was pretty damn predicatble, but it's an entertaining read nonetheless.
Rating:
Summary: Best Book since Patty Jane's House of Curl
Review: I have read all her books and LOVED this one, it would make a great movie. It's interesting that Amazon.com would offer to sell it with Fanny Flagg, because the writing style is very similiar. This is the kind of book I buy and then put on my self to enjoy again.
Rating:
Summary: Best Yet!
Review: This is her best yet! I have read her past novels, but this is by far her best. The characters are very well developed and I laughed and cried throughout. I have passed it around and have even started to entertain the thought of forming a small book club. You won't want to miss this one!
Rating:
Summary: Congratulations to Lorna!
Review: Fans of Lorna Landvik will adore this book. Those who haven't read her previous four novels will discover a writer who makes you laugh and cry at the same time. My criteria for a good read. In Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons Landvik has crafted a novel of wonderful characters full of depth who you care about. Landvik's vast knowledge of popular culture takes us from the late sixties into the nineties in a jouney that is both funny and sad but ultimately uplifing. Watching these friends go through life and their book club together is a wonderful journey that shouldn't be missed.
Rating:
Summary: I wanna move to Freesia Court!
Review: Simply stated, Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons is a pure reading delight from beginning to end. Okay, so the five female characters do tend to wander into stereotypical prototype land a bit at times and yes, you can usually spot their various plotlines coming a mile away, but so what! In Lorna Landvik's hands, they still manage to come to life and even start to feel like family as you travel with them through their first meeting in 1968 up to the present day and everything in between. I wouldn't be suprised to see "AHEB" book groups springing up around the country once word of mouth of this wonderful novel spreads.
Rating: 
Summary: I wanna be in their book club!
Review: Once again, Minnesota author, Landvik has woven a tale about the strong force of female friendship. AHEB follows the lives of a group of friends through 30 years and just as many heartaches. Landvik has a gift for creating quirky characters that you just fall in love with. All their heartaches become your heartaches, and their triumphs become yours as well. I was sad when I finished the book because I knew I would miss these women! I enjoyed this book more than her last one, Welcome to the Great Mysterious, but nothing comes close to Patty Jane's House of Curl.
Rating:
Summary: A 'Must Read' for women everywhere!
Review: I've been waiting years for a book that rivaled "The Savings Graces" (by Patricia Gaffney) with the characters and how their lives and their stories are intertwined. This book is finally the one! This is an amazing story of five women who are neighbors in Minneapolis. They become friends and form a book club called Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons. It spans three decades of friendship, marriage, divorce, babies, grown children, secrets, growing up, you name it - it's in there. It flows effortlessly between the different women's perspectives and even provides a new list of books to check out! Each chapter begins with a book and the reason the host chose it for their book club. I found myself thinking of the neighborhood I grew up in, my friends, my Mom's friends, family friends, all of those bonds that form the fabric of our lives. It is a Must Read for any women who have close friendships. I can't wait for my Mom and my best friend to read it - they will both love it.
Rating:
Summary: Effortless, tear- & laughter-provoking read. I loved it.
Review: It's been a long, long time since I've been handed a book that I truly put aside just about everything except food, drink and visits to the potty to finish. It almost sounds cliche but this book made me laugh outloud (as though I was stoned right along with Audrey, Faith, Slim, Kari and Merit). I want to live in a place like Fresia Court. I gave this book 5 stars, not because it's great literature, but because I wasn't a bit sorry I'd invested my time in reading it. Besides, how often is great literature FUN???
Rating:
Summary: 30 years of bon bons and books
Review: 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
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