Oh Dear Silvia: The gloriously heartwarming novel from the No. 1 bestselling author of Because of You

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It is also about relationships and family, huge focus on both, with Sylvia being in a coma, all the characters address all their issues with her in a very honest and raw emotive way. Though there are quite a few narrators, they were all very distinctive and even if it didn't have their names at the beginning of each chapter, you'd know who they were. As is quite common in French's writing, “Oh Dear Silvia” is quite simple to read but is grounded in reality with a number of life's hard truths contained amongst the often humorous prose. This book follows Silvia Shute, who is currently in a coma in hospital after falling three floors from her balcony. Badly written, unbelievable plot, intensely irritating and most definitely not a 'hilarious' or 'side splitting, darkly humorous' read as the quotes say on the front of the book.

To explain my rating of this book, although there was a lot of elements of this book which I enjoyed, it did take me a while to get into it. Her children hate her and haven't seen her in years, her husband is wounded and bitter at the abrupt end to their marriage, and her sister is too loony to really know who her sister was.

I'm not sure I had any real expectation regarding Silvia as a character but within the first few chapters we found out that she was a bit of a bitch towards her ex-husband and she'd effectively kicked her own children out on the street. It's confusing but the time that she was apparently kicked out didn't match up with her daughter's age or the time when her parents got divorced.

I was disappointed unfortunately, and actually came away from the book feeling annoyed with the characters and quite discouraged and depressed somehow. Però ha dei buoni spunti (i personaggi ruotano attorno a una donna in coma irreversibile che non può ascoltare o rispondere e questo crea situazioni scenograficamente interessanti, anche se non sempre riescono appieno).I had seen glowing praise for her debut novel, A Tiny Bit Marvellous, so I was delighted to receive this book for review to decide for myself whether Dawn is as good an author as she is a comedienne. The characters are all very well portrayed, and the only one I felt was perhaps played for laughs a little too much was Silvia's cleaner, Tia, although even she has her own little back story going on and so she isn't only there to be funny. Perhaps it was the omniscient point of view, mixed in with the first person narratives of Silvia's nearest and dearest. The first problem I had with the novel is that two of the six main characters have their speech written in dialect – Winnie in a Jamaican lingo - “Right, sidung ‘pon dat chair, sista. It's hard to have any action, except in flashbacks, when the whole novel takes place in a hospital room.

for me, a very mixed bag and whilst there are a fair few characters, each chapter is titled with their name so it is very easy to follow.

It's a story about loss, and saying goodbye, but it's also a story about finding the truth and finding love.