The dialogue is comedic at times which I found to be a small reprieve from the slowness of this book. Ed's dialogue really bored me. 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, Also, if a coked-up doctor who you suspect is abusive enough a person that you need to isolate your whole family from her, including your unborn grandchild, turns up at your house high as a kite with a dead husband in her trunk, you call the police. Silvia’s motivation to begin a relationship with Cat and cut herself off from her whole family feels really unrealistic and I didn’t buy it at all. None of the aspects of Silvia gel and, for this novel to be successful, this needed to happen.

French masterfully takes us through Sylvia's life. We change our view of her and the people around her as the book progresses, and by the end, we wish all could have been explained, made right. 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. A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.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."

For Silvia hides a secret. One she can never tell. And as her visitors congregate, so the truth about Silvia is slowly revealed. The Silvia of the title is a lady in a coma in hospital and although she is the central character of the story we don't really actually hear from her and, instead, it's the cast of characters who come to visit her who create the character of Silvia for us. Each chapter is about an individual character, often running as their own monologue of their thoughts about Silvia or the things they have to say to her. These characters range from Silvia's family members, her friend, her cleaner to her nurse, Winnie, who really felt like the lynch-pin for the whole story. Each character comes along to visit Silvia, for various different reasons, and through the things they have to say we learn about them as well as about Silvia. After having read "A tiny bit marvellous" - Dawn French's debut fictional novel - I had high hopes for Oh Dear Silvia, but I was also slightly apprehensive. There was something magical (in realistic terms) about "A Tiny Bit Marvellous" and I feared she wouldn't be able to live up to this. And indeed, this novel is very different from "A tiny bit marvellous"; so much so that you feel slightly confused in the beginning. Is it a comedy? Can you even laugh about this subject (yes, you can, to a certain extent)? Is it a drama? Or a thriller? But I should have known I could relax: Dawn French is an excellent writer, and you're safe in her hands.The title of this book really works. After reading the book, I would say it definitely fits well with the story.

I love the idea behind this book - The whole book takes place in Coma Suite 5, where Silvia, a friend, lover and mother lies in a coma. The story is told through several people - her ex-husband (Ed), her sister (Jo), her daughter (Cassie), her 'lover' (Cat), her housekeeper (Tia) and her nurse (Winnie). There isn't really a progressive plot as such, but this is more of a collection of memories, wishes and thoughts have about Silvia and how she has changed each narrator's life. I find books like this very intriguing, so I was interested in seeing what each person had to say. The housekeeper Tia almost seemed like an irrelevant character only brought in to show cultural diversity and an extra point of view. I did think that Tia was very stereotypical; she is an Asian housekeeper stealing from her employer to make some more money who calls Silvia 'Mrs Shit' and apparently doesn't want to understand why her sons laugh at her when they teach her new words (which are actually expletives). I couldn't fully understand why Tia was there as a character because she had no real emotional connection with her employer and therefore it seemed odd that she would be visiting her in hospital. 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? 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. 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.

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The first problem I had with the novel is that two of the six main characters have their speech written in dialect – Winnie in a Jamaican lingo - “Right, sidung ‘pon dat chair, sista. Yu better start talking. Gimme some reasons for dis craziness” (p193). No, just no. Tia, the Asian housekeeper, oh so amusingly refers to Silvia as “Mrs Shit”: “Tia has been taught to swear by her two sons who were born and grew up in England, and who amuse themselves by cajoling her into using utterly inappropriate language. She’s not stupid, she knows they are having a laugh at her expense, but she can’t be bothered to deduce exactly why, and frankly, she doesn’t care”. Again, just no. It’s cringeworthy. 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.

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. When Dawn French wrote her first novel [[A Tiny Bit Marvellous by Dawn French]] I was eager to read it, looking forward to plenty of silly humour and those elusive-when-reading out loud laughs. I was disappointed unfortunately, and actually came away from the book feeling annoyed with the characters and quite discouraged and depressed somehow. So, I approached her new novel with a little trepidation, unsure as to whether she deserved a second chance. I'm glad I gave her the benefit of the doubt! Which made the ending more poignant. One character WILL get their comeuppance. Another's selfless actions will possibly never be understood, but if so, never can be made right.

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Although there is a mystery in this story, I don't feel this is the essence of the story. It's something else, something that is more powerful; yet at the same time very subtle. There is a vast amount of characters buzzing around the coma patient Silvia, and they all contribute, slowly, to build a picture of her; a picture that gets more and more complicated the further into the novel you come. Silvia, who seemingly without reason has rejected her whole family, is not a very likeable person, as it appears. All centred around the now lifeless hub that is Silvia, the characters deal with their grief, guilt and fear, and it becomes clear - to them, and the reader - that humanity is a vital part of moving on in life. And that's really the essence of this book. Absolution. Forgiveness. Loyalty. And love, of course. 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.