Because of You: The bestselling Richard & Judy book club pick

Product Information

Unfortunately, Hope’s baby is stillborn whilst Anna has a beautiful baby girl she calls Florence. A few hours later as Hope is heading home she goes past Anna’s room where both she and her partner are asleep and she sneaks a peek at the baby. Little Florence lifts her hand to Hope and at that moment she loses all sense of what is right and wrong and puts the baby in her night bag and carries her out to the car where her other half is waiting. As the old millennium turns into the new, two very different women give birth to two very similar daughters. I really wanted to like this as it was given to me as a gift. Instead I found myself skim-reading. Dawn French has tried to do a Jodi Picoult and failed. I found this book depressing from the word go. The premise is an interesting one but we spend far too much time inside the heads of the characters and this really means that the story was actually thin.

Florence isn’t noticed as missing for some time with her parents asleep and the midwives leaving them to rest. When the news breaks the hospital presume Hope left way before Florence was taken and she isn’t a suspect. But that night one gives birth to a very healthy little baby girl and the other faces the most unimaginable heartache when their baby is born a stillbirth.

I listened to this on audio with Dawn French reading it and was very enjoyable in the fact she could express how she wanted the story and words to come over to its reader. I think feeling sorry for Hope also came from knowing that Florence’s dad was a self-loving idiot who would have ruined his daughter’s life, just like he did his wife. I like the way that Dawn French kind of made him out to be the baddy in the book, and that he was an MP too.

Obviously without giving the story line away, the premis of the book is the switched baby scenario. The writing in pleasant and engaging and it did hold my attention. However her narrative has more holes than my Granny's crochet blanket. She will have you believe that a baby is taken from a hospital, and the crime is being investigated by a lone detective sergeant and a couple of detective constables. Her treatment of the police is woeful and fuels prejudices that are quite unbecoming by authors of her caliber. I think she has relied solely on her fertile imagination in favor of any kind of research into police procedures' , or still birth hospital procedures. Terrible. Dawn French is a talented comedian, but this book is dreadful and so unrealistic with so many errors. There seems to have been no research done on any of the themes. How did it get past the editor? Oh my goodness. This was such an emotional read with a difficult subject at its heart but amongst the emotional turmoil there is humour too. Dawn French handles the story with warmth and somehow even though a wrong has been done, the leading female characters feel so credible that you really care about them. In fact they all have vivid personalities, including the minor characters. There are those like DI Thripshaw that provide the comedic and toe curling moments with his malapropisms and crassness whilst his colleague DC Debbie Cheese provides the empathy. This was an awful book. I found the beginning and the end very distressing, and most of the rest of it farcical and not funny. It’s a Marmite book: I’m really not sure it’s one you could be on the fence about.I listened to this as an audiobook and as it is narrated by the author herself, there is a real quality of diction and a good variety of voices and accents. It is entertaining and well produced and you can tell that she reads the text overall with warmth and a smile. The author is a compelling narrator and storyteller, she is after all quite a national treasure. Harrowing but uplifting . . . It is a book about mistakes, regret, forgiveness and unconditional love Daily Mirror In another room on the ward Hope, and her partner Quiet Isaac, are nervous but excited at the prospect of the soon-to-be new addition to their little family. Hope and Isaac know love, true love, and their relationship is tender, with a shared appreciation for family, for kindness and for knowing what is truly important in life. Although the pregnancy was unexpected, both Hope and Isaac embrace this new future and are very much looking forward to this new journey they are about to embark on. All characters in this book fit neatly into a box, they are either nice, funny, dim or nasty. There is an absence of any complexity , ensuring that the reader is not unnecessarily taxed by thinking. This is a good job, otherwise they may ask questions such as what happened to the dead baby which is presumably still unclaimed in the hospital at this point !

The ending also is quite fantastical. All I will say is that when there is an unexpected death, a coroner has to get involved and organ donation is not on the agenda. Just no way! I absolutely loved Because of You. Fantastic, passionate, compassionate, so much wisdom, a lot of humour, very real and credible' BERNARDINE EVARISTO, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other Wise and poignant, Because of You is a story about mothers and daughter, love and loss, mistakes and regrets, and family bonds Eastern Daily PressI felt very emotionally engaged by the opening section of this book but, as the story progressed, it came to feel increasingly melodramatic and sentimental so it turned into something like a soap opera. The characters' actions seemed more directed by the plot rather than feeling logical or real. In particular, I felt the character of Anna was thinly drawn and it was hard for me to believe she'd act so graciously given the circumstances. There are some funny and tender moments within the story but overall it felt a bit too forced for me to fully enjoy it or find it impactful. It's a bit unfair to react to French's writing in connection to her celebrity status. However, I feel like there are some well-known public figures such as Graham Norton who've written popular novels which are fine but they probably receive undue attention just because the authors are already known to the public. I probably wouldn't be so harsh criticising this novel if I weren't reading it in the context of a book prize because I think it's mostly enjoyable, but I don't think it's as impactful as the other books listed for this award. For eighteen years Hope kept the secret from everyone, not telling anyone her real daughter was stillborn and the daughter she has now, Minnie, isn’t really hers. But as time goes on Hope realises what she did was wrong and she needs to come clean, but what will happen to her perfect family once the world finds out? As if its want to be this light and fluffy story but the plot itself doesn’t really fit with that, and its too silly and full of plot holes that honestly don’t make sense, if the author actually sat down and researched a little? Because of You is very much a story about a mother’s love. It is a tale of deep sadness, of regret and of anguish, at times uplifting but also filled with a suffering and torment. There are characters we should intensely dislike in this sometimes challenging tale but Dawn French somehow makes the reader have empathy and compassion instead. I'm finding it difficult to distill what I thought about this story. The blurb says 'told with her signature humour, warmth and so much love'. And we can hear Dawn French's voice throughout. If you follow Dawn at all, you know what I mean. But I actually thought that hearing Dawn's 'voice' throughout was distracting. And the humour, such as it was in a difficult story such as this, was like 'cheap'. And I didn't laugh, and after the first couple of throw out lines, didn't even smile. It began to annoy me.

An uplifting story about mothers and daughters and familial relationships, in which two very different women give birth to two very similar daughters on the same night Woman & Home Fans who have waited five long years for French's fourth novel won't be disappointed: Because Of You is a book with a beating heart, a story told with warmth and verve Daily Express After five long years of waiting for a new novel, Dawn's millions of fans will fall in love with this tantalising story of motherhood. Dawn French said in her interview that she wanted to explore the themes of nature vs nurture and loss. Honestly, the very thought of hinging the exploration of nature vs nurture on a stolen baby and a stillbirth makes me uncomfortable as a parent. The exploration of loss felt no more than a lip service as it seemed like the author wanted to generate warm feelings for Hope in the readers' minds, so she conveniently chose to sideline the grief of Anna. Maybe it's me, but I fail to see why there should even be an expectation of warm feelings here for someone who committed the unimaginable crime of stealing a newborn, no matter what circumstances drove her to do it or how much effort she put into raising that baby. As a parent, this not only felt disturbing to me but it also felt offensive.But the build up of the relationship between Hope and 'her daughter' and the way the reveal was dealt with and how the daughter was reunited with her biological mother was acceptable. The warmth of the mother / daughter relationship (with both mothers) was there and true to the Dawn we think we know. Hope is the grieving mother and as she leaves the hospital, the grief hits her particularly hard. She is wobbly and bouncing off walls on her way out. She falls against the wall right at the room where the other mother and baby are - and she opportunistically grabs their child. The parents are sleeping. Whispering Stories was established in 2015. The blog is here to share our love of books and the bookish world, alongside our other passions in life. We are based in the UK. Because Of You is a tale told with warmth by a storyteller who never takes herself too seriously Sunday Express Because of You is a gloriously, beautiful book. I knew what Hope had done was so wrong and on many levels evil, but I also couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. Grief is a strange and difficult emotion to control and I can understand the want to hold a baby and love a child like the one she had lost. At the same time, she causes so much grief to the other family by taking their daughter.