A TINY BIT MARVELLOUS BY DAWN FRENCH, PENGUIN, $32.95.
Families are the current Big Subject in fiction, so I was interested to check out UK comedian Dawn French’s first novel, which arrives with the tag, “Everyone hates the perfect family. So you’ll love the Battles”. Well, I didn’t love them at first.
Written in the form of diary entries by mother Mo and the two teenage Battles, it felt like being stuck in the middle of a raging, rowdy generational war – and please, can’t someone stop them yelling at each other? Yet the characters won me over halfway through, especially the son of the house, Peter, who dresses like a 19th century fop, prefers to be addressed as Oscar and affects a Wildean pomposity that made me hoot. The husband finds his voice only late in the book, which, after all the laughs, ends with a gentle gravity that takes you by surprise.
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