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

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Cassie was living at home when she discovered she was pregnant and then a week after telling her mother, she is evicted from the house. I really wanted to like this book and in fact I had mentioned it enough times that my boyfriend bought this for my 21st birthday (3 years ago, oh my goodness).

It's hard to have any action, except in flashbacks, when the whole novel takes place in a hospital room.Silvia is someone who admittedly isn’t always likable; she isn’t liked by all of her visitors and I enjoyed these sub-plots to the story and felt there were plenty of surprises along the way. I have previously read her autobiography, Dear Fatty as well as her first fictional novel, A Tiny Bit Marvellous, both of which I loved and gave 5 stars without question. I understand that the whole point of the novel with its multiple storytellers is that we understand how multifaceted people are and that different people mean different things to different people, but there is no cohesiveness within the character of Silvia. Our most serious character in the book is probably Ed, who I did enjoy reading about, but sometimes, in contrast with the other characters, felt a little dull. As I am meant to, I started the book feeling certain ways about several characters and slowly and with revelations suddenly found victims and their controllers were switching places, reasons for behaviours were shed light on, misconceptions were cleared.

I will not include any spoilers, but the book has one of the most awful characters ever written, the most hateful person ever. Ed doesn't like sister Jo either and that just makes the whole bed-watching a chore and very painful. In her career spanning three decades, she has been nominated for six BAFTA Awards and also won a Fellowship BAFTA along with her best friend Jennifer Saunders. It's a story about loss and saying goodbye, but it's also a story about finding the truth and finding love. The concept of a person being multi-faceted was interesting, but it just didn't come across well in the book.

The writing style itself felt incredibly amateur, and maybe it's because I was writing my own novel at the same time, but it just seemed so cringeworthy and I could spot exactly the same tactics I was using to increase my word count without writing anything of quality. Her first three novels, A Tiny Bit Marvellous, Oh Dear Silvia and According to YES, are all Sunday Times bestsellers. Instead what I got was the tale of a complex woman, one misunderstood by almost everyone in her life, told through the visitors to her hospital room, where she lies in a coma. The story is told through several people - her ex-husband (Ed), her sister (Jo), her daughter (Cassie), her 'lover' (Cat), her housekeeper (Tia) and her nurse (Winnie).

So when I picked up "Oh Dear Silvia", I expected more of the same - something light and humorous, something to make me laugh and forget.And indeed, this novel is very different from "A tiny bit marvellous"; so much so that you feel slightly confused in the beginning.

Although she doesn't speak throughout the book, it shows six characters who visit her hospital room and have differing relationships with her, each very different from the others. The dialogue is comedic at times which I found to be a small reprieve from the slowness of this book.Dawn French’s first novel ‘A Tiny Bit Marvellous’ was really good but this second novel is incredible. This book follows Silvia Shute, who is currently in a coma in hospital after falling three floors from her balcony. All of the visitors, with the exception of her nurse who never knew her and her housekeeper, Silvia seems universally disliked. Supposedly the reason why Silvia blocked out her whole family and started ignoring them was because Cat shows up one night, with the body of her ex-husband in her car, high on drugs. There is an awful lot of padding and repetition and little in the way of plot development considering the not inconsiderable size of the book.