ANGRY HOUSEWIVES EATING BON BONS

Through thirty-five years, a neighborhood book club frames the lives of five women--as told through first-person narratives of each. While the performers' names are not given on the package, the first and last cassettes list them as Ruth Ann Phimister, Kate Forbes, Cristine McMurdo-Wallis, Christina Moore, and James Jenner. With varying degrees of skill, they capture the sometimes mundane, occasionally terrifying, and often emotional events in the friends' daily existence. Phimister sounds much more convincing in the older years of her characters' lives than in portraying them in their twenties, while Christina Moore nails the eternally youthful Slip. The story and its performers offer a dose of real life, including reality's ability to make us think or bore us to tears. R.P.L. (c) AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine [Published: DEC 04/ JAN 05]