Tara Chirpy / 21 October 2013 / Categories: Books, Novel

Oh Dear Silvia

The internationally bestselling author and acclaimed comedic actress Dawn French makes her American literary debut with this riveting novel of secrets, forgiveness, guilt, and love.

Silvia Shute has always done exactly what she wants. But after a fall from a balcony, her life has suddenly, shockingly stopped.

Now she's unconscious in a hospital bed, at the mercy of the mad friends and crazy relatives who have come to visit. Her beleaguered ex-husband, her newly independent daughter, her West Indian nurse, her bohemian sister, her best friend, her enthusiastic housekeeper, and others all share a piece of their collective mind with the complex woman—the bad mother, the cherished sister, the selfish wife, the matchless lover, the egotist, the martyr—they think they know.

And Silvia can't talk back.

As she lies there, captive to the beloveds, the babblers, and the stark-raving bonkers who alternate at her bedside, the dark and terrible secret she has been hiding for years begins to emerge.

Like it or not, the truth has come to pay Silvia a visit. Again, and again, and again . . .

NOT A RANT NOT A RAVE

I am luke warm about this book. First things first. Anyone who says this book delivers the brilliantly clever dry humour you expect from the equally brilliant genius comedienne that is Dawn French think again and do not believe the review snippets of the jacket as funny this book is not.

I found the first half slow and probably would not have got much further had I not bought it to accompany me and make me laugh on a short holiday. It was the only reading I had and

I found myself turning the pages looking for the gags instead of engaging in the story.

That said the clever things about the book and I could hear Dawn coming through in her characters, was the Jamaican patois written to perfection of her nurse Winnie and the Irish accent jumped off the page of the pushy doctor Cat, Silvia's friend/partner.

Once I settled into the story and went on the journey with Silvia, the main character as she lays in Suite 5 of ICU, in a coma, after failing from a balcony I was touched by how much Dawn connected me to the events in that hospital room.

The book did have a profound effect on me, a heart breaking effect in many ways as Dawn explores the deep crevices of broken relationships as the people in Silvia's life struggle with the here and now and dealing with the possible, the inevitable; death and grief.

This book didn't turn out to be anything close to what I was expecting which in a way steered me away from actually really getting into it for the get go but I did learn a great deal about myself, changed my views about the "what is important in the bigger scheme of things" and gave me a deeper understanding of why we do the things we do.

Dawn writes from the heart and definitely from a place of experience which in the latter pages I confess, excavated some buried emotions right to the surface and made me cry, wail in fact....which was extremely cathartic even if a little embarrassing on a plane.