Book info

• Title A Tiny Bit Marvellous
• Author Dawn French
• Year 2010
• Genre Humour

Everyone hates the perfect family. So you'll love the Battles. Meet Mo Battle, about to turn 50 and mum to two helpless, hormonal teenagers. There's 17-year-old daughter Dora who blames Mo for, like, EVERYTHING and Peter who believes he's quite simply as darling and marvellous as his hero Oscar Wilde. Somewhere, keeping quiet, is Dad... who's just, well... Dad. However, Mo is having a crisis. She's about to do something unusually wild and selfish, which will leave the entire family teetering on the edge of a precipice. Will the family fall? Or will they, when it really matters, be there for each other?

Thoughts

I do quite love Dawn French, so I really thought this was going to be a great book to read. Perhaps I went into it expecting too much. I know I had waited far too long to read it because I refused to pay the £10 price tag for a Kindle book. It was reduced in price recently, and I snapped it up, and got reading.

It’s really not that great at all. Told by means of three distinct voices, writing in their own diaries - a rather depressing mother, a supremely irritating teenage daughter, and a slightly younger boy obsessed with Oscar Wilde. I must say the three voices are very clear and well-written for what they are, I just found it hard to get interested in any of them.

Perhaps it’s because I have nothing in common with any of those three, but they were not particularly likeable characters anyway. The crux of the story was simple and thus dragged on for a little too long. For a while, I was reading with Dawn French’s voice in my head, and that made it better, but I couldn’t keep it up for the whole book. It was also compounded by the fact that for the crucial part of the story, a sudden diary entry appeared from the dad, which was entirely jolting and inexplicable. I so wanted to like it, but I’m sad to say I didn’t.

Rating: 2 / 5