A Tiny Bit Marvellous

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Dad sadly does not get his own narrative, apart from one chapter, but regularly pops up in the other three. Mo/s Mother, the Grandma who's deep insight is matched by a remarkable ability to bake the right cake for the right person (reminded me of Joanne Harris's 'Chocolat! She is fed up with her life that is the same, day in day out, she is a wife and mother to two teenagers, Dora who is seventeen and has self-esteem problems and holds her mum responsible for everything going wrong in her life and Peter who truly believes he is Oscar Wilde, his hero.

When I won this novel courtesy of Mel’s Random Reviews I was thrilled and took in away with me on my recent holiday looking for a laugh or two. With each chapter told from the point of view of one character, Dawn French’s witty and engaging novel offers us an honest and insightful account into the relationships between children and parents.Her first three novels, A Tiny Bit Marvellous, Oh Dear Silvia and According to YES, are all Sunday Times bestsellers. The story is told in diary form by Mo, the matriarch of the family and her two teenage children, Dora and Peter.

Yes, we know teenage girls overuse 'like' and we've seen shallowness and mother-hating (but mother-loving underneath all the vitriol, ahhh) a thousand times before. Mo laughingly ignores these, passing Dora's atrocious behaviour off as a teenage phase, because after all, Mo is a psychologist and no one can tell HER how the young mind works!Her bestselling memoir, Dear Fatty, was published in the United Kingdom to critical acclaim, and her first novel, A Tiny Bit Marvellous, was a number-one UK bestseller.

You will see chaos and flood of insecurities and stupidity and height of delusion in some chapters and then calmness and stability in some.I really can't believe I read the whole thing, shaking my head and rolling my eyes the entire time, and I sure hope my book club chooses something better next time because I fully intend to finish that one too. Others have documented the style: it's a sort of modern take on the epistolary form, with different characters narrating each chapter in the first-person. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. The cliched attempts to breath life into these characters simply didn't work, and their cumbersome ways of self expression was extremely hard to read.

But soon she started to irritate me as she really does have the blinkers on when it comes to her family and becomes increasingly self-centred. The teenage daughter is written in Vicky Pollard's voice and is tediously hateful and self-loathing. There’s seventeen-year-old Dora, a stroppy teenager who’s just come out of her first relationship (it lasted a whole six weeks) and who’s longing to escape to university; her long-suffering mother, Mo, a child psychiatrist who’s baffled by the antagonist behaviour of her children; and sixteen-year-old Peter, who prefers to be known as Oscar due to his obsession with Oscar Wilde. She is ripe for the attention of an unscrupulous younger man who offers excitement and adventure that her mild husband doesn’t. This is a tool to avoid using prose to set up scenes and describe the action, and it makes the book a bit like reading four different diaries at the same time.The ploy of keeping the 2 "heroes" - Nan; the quiet, constant, wisdom of experience and Dad; the voiceless, much-derided, barely present figure very much in the background definately worked for me and revealing the latters name only with the very last word of the book was tear-jerkingly poignant. Der Klappentext verspricht ein Buch voller Geheimnisse und Spannung, doch wer darauf hofft, dürfte reichlich enttäuscht werden, denn viel passiert nicht zwischen diesen zwei Buchdeckeln.