This second novel by Dawn French is easy to read but in the early parts difficult to interweave the various contributions of the narrators into a cohesive piece of work. Persevere, it is worth it. Silvia Shute has fallen three floors from a balcony. She is in intensive care in a coma on life-support including mechanical ventilation. She is the younger sister of the eccentric Jo. They lost their mother at a young age and their army-trained father went off the rails. Sylvia divorced dependable Ed after showing little love for him or their two children, Jamie and Cassie who after leaving home had no love or respect for their mother.

The characters are well-developed which I found to be a relief. Each chapter of the book is told by someone who knows Silvia. The main characters that have their own chapters being Ed, Cat, Jo, Cassie, Winnie, and Tia. Ed is by far the most boring character that could ever be in a book. All he mostly talks about is his boring trees. Whilst I did find him to be a well-developed character, I found him extremely dull and found myself wishing that he'd just stop talking. Winnie and Tia were my favourite characters. Winnie has a big heart, and it really comes across in this book. Tia is from Indonesia so has a hard time pronouncing Silvia's surname which always made me laugh!! I found Tia and Jo to be the characters that brought the humour, and they delivered! Cat is the high strung character, and Cassie is the angry daughter. Each character has a unique personality. Well done to Dawn French for making each character unique! Through each of the characters' stories, we learn more and more about Silvia. This book follows Silvia Shute, who is currently in a coma in hospital after falling three floors from her balcony. 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 book is written from six perspectives; ex-husband Ed, sister Jo, nurse Winnie, housekeeper Tia, friend Cat and daughter Cassie. I had no problems with the book being told from so many different points of view, in fact it was more interesting that way, however, each one of the characters seemed to either a) hate Silvia; or b) be completely ambivalent about her so I started to wonder why they were even there. I also had issues with each character individually which I will now get into,

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I found the blurb misleading. I was expecting something like an in-depth analysis of Sylvia Schute from a variety of angles, but for the most part the novel is far more concerned with everybody else. The fact of the matter is that the lady in the coma has ostracised almost everyone, and all of their lives have well and truly moved on without her. There are seven other protagonists! Silvia just so happens to be the common denominator. The second problem I had with the novel is that it just doesn’t make any sense. 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. Even timelines were confused and illogical and changed inexplicably from chapter to chapter.

The title of this book really works. After reading the book, I would say it definitely fits well with the story. A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.She and Henry have both described their parting as involving a year of concerted effort to be kind, and to end up "as chums, as we had started, if you like". Perhaps this is true, and very impressive if so; perhaps there is a good helping of wish fulfilment, or a united front for the media. Whatever the case, both are now seeing other people, Henry a theatre producer, and French a charity worker who used to work with her mother, and who also had, somewhat to her surprise (given how much of a mainstay she has been in the BBC light entertainment schedules for the last 30 years), never seen her on screen. 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. 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. I was very impressed with the authenticity of each character, as they were all so very different, though you could still sense that some of the characters were connected (Ed and his daughter). I was also impressed with the depth of each character - the character building through the chats to Silvia in the suite was very well done. We get to see many different sides to the characters as they go through various emotional stages. Interaction between the conscious characters was also fantastic, particularly towards the end. I also enjoyed the use of dialect. 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. At first I was very unsure about the book. There were parts that held my attention and some parts I struggled with. At the beginning, I didn't enjoy the writing, particularly the way most of the words were underlined for emphasis. I got used to it, then different dialects were brought in which, again, made me unsure. I did find Winnie's Jamaican dialect to be charming, though I was unsure about Tia. Tia is foreign and her children taught her to use lots of swearing and incorrect words when talking - sure, it was funny at the start, but I found it to be tiresome after a while and didn't like it. 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. I loved it. Having just finished, and thinking about the book as a whole, it is very assured and from one you might think is an experienced writer.

As the title reveals, the story circles around Silvia, who is lying unconscious in a hospital intensive care unit. We meet her ex-husband, her estranged daughter, her best friend, her cleaner and her nurse, who all talk to the sleeping Silvia, revealing what has happened in the past. All, except the kindly nurse, have their axes to grind with the unconscious patient, who by all accounts isn't a very nice person. Or is she just misunderstood? Though there was the underlying sense of morality there was a level of humour through the events that occured within Suite 5. Unfortunately I just felt it was all too forced. Her past holds a dark and terrible secret, and now that she is unconscious in a hospital bed, her constant stream of visitors are set to uncover the mystery of her broken life. And she must lie there, victim of the beloveds, the borings, the babblings and the plain bonkers. Oh Dear Silvia is the second novel by British comedienne/actress, and now author, Dawn French. 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. I love Dawn French! I think she is such a funny woman!! I was so happy to have won a copy of her fiction book entitled Oh Dear Silvia from Goodreads. However, once I started reading the book, it became apparent that I wasn't going to enjoy it.She describes, for instance, the moment of shift from daughter to matriarch, as it becomes clear, in the novel, that Silvia will not waken. It was something she felt herself, as it became obvious that her own mother would not survive. "I just felt, 'Oh, god. Because my dad had already died" – he killed himself when she was 19 – "I thought, 'Oh, god, I'm going to have to grow up.'" A huge belly laugh. "I'm going to be that person in the family, I'm going to be the matriarch." 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). I really just couldn't get into this book and I had some major issues with it. She has also, over the past three or so years, spent a lot of time dissecting the nature of marriage. When she was writing her novel (which begins with a visit from Silvia's ex-husband, still trying to work out what the power relationships were in their marriage, how they capsized) she was acting alongside Alfred Molina in BBC2 sitcom Roger and Val Have Just Got In. Set in real time, in the half hour when they get home from work every day, it is "a piece about the intricacies, and the smallness of a marriage," the day-to-day glue, particularly when, as in the case of Roger and Val, they are in the process of surviving the death of a baby, distracting each other, as French puts it, "with play and constant blether". French has described the sitcom as "like stealing money from the comedy department to make a drama"; it was reviewed in this paper as "not … comedy as we know it, but Roger & Val manages to mix beautifully written dialogue with a quiet observational humour that can nevertheless leave the viewer gasping for air"; French's performance was one of the best of her career. Although French didn't write the sitcom (twins Beth and Emma Kilcoyne did that), the idea for it was hers, developed while her real-life, 25-year marriage to Lenny Henry was breaking up. Also, this was meant to be funny???? There is literally nothing in it that I even thought was meant to be a joke.

A matchless lover? A supreme egotist? A selfless martyr? A bad mother? A cherished sister? A selfish wife? As she has got older, she says, she has felt less and less the need to perform, to put on a "firework display. And it's a massive relief. Somewhere in my 40s I thought, 'this is exhausting, trying to make it alright for everybody and trying to please everyone all the time.' It doesn't mean you have to turn in and be entirely selfish – it just means you have to stop a little bit of that." Did people find it disconcerting? "I think some people did, yeah. Because I just went a bit quieter. I think you only find out your true nature when you return home, and when you have a bit of peace and quiet. Dawn French has been making people laugh for thirty years. On purpose. As a writer, comedian and actor, she has appeared in some of this country's most long running, cherished and celebrated shows, including French and Saunders, The Comic Strip Presents. . ., Murder Most Horrid, The Vicar of Dibley, Jam and Jerusalem, Lark Rise to Candleford, and more recently, Roger and Val Have Just Got In.Fantastic, passionate, compassionate, so much wisdom, a lot of humour, very real and credible' BERNARDINE EVARISTO Even with the strong character personalities and comedic timing, this book still fell flat. I felt that this book was missing a plot. Oh Dear Silvia comes across more as a memoir about Silvia then anything else. There are some subplots, some improbable and others rather repetitive. The circumstances surrounding the ill-tempered, violent, possessive Irish Cat (a GP),are an important part of the novel, yet do have some improbable features. The descriptions of her native Connemara are attractively portrayed. Not for me, this book. Although there's nothing wrong with the writing, I just could not believe in the characters. They all seemed unreal to me, including Silvia, who although in a coma, was the largest presence in the book. Un vantaggio però c'è, nella solitudine, e cioè che attraverso di lei tutto acquista un fascino particolare. Hai così disperatamente bisogno di vedere un po' di bellezza per mitigare tutto lo schifo che hai attorno, che gli alberi finiscono per essere più verdi, il sole più caldo e il pane più buono di quanto non lo fosse quando pensavi di essere felice, e per niente solo. È come se il mondo m'invitasse a uscire a giocare - e indossa il suo vestito migliore."