Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons

I probably can’t be fair to this book right now. Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons is an entertaining bit of fluff. It’s beach reading, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Unfortunately, since I’d just read The Time Traveler’s Wife, it’s fluff felt a little too fluffy for me. It was like eating filet mignon and having cotton candy for dessert.

The book follows the decades long friendship of Slip, Faith, Audrey, Merit, and Kari, who are the members of a book club called Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons (AHEB for short). The characters, though likeable enough, lack depth. There’s the spunky one, the one with the secret past, the sexy one, the beautiful one, and the maternal one, and not a whole lot of nuance beyond that shorthand.

The women have problems and challenges to overcome, but those problems get solved in an awfully tidy way. Kari confesses to her adopted daughter Julia that her birth mother is Kari’s niece, Mary Jo. Julia is upset by the deception and doesn’t talk to her mother for months, filling her with anguish. That anguish, though mostly happens off camera, and the two of them work it out with little fanfare. More egregiously, Merit is abused by her husband, but having her friends witness one time what she’s put up with for years is all it takes to make her decide to get out of her marriage. It’s all a little too simple.

This book read like countless other books I’ve read about women with long friendships and offered nothing new. In a month, I’ll have forgotten all about it.