Oh Dear Silvia by Dawn French.

This is the second novel written by Dawn French and having read this, I have to say that I preferred the first.  'A Tiny Bit Marvellous' was funny whereas this one lacked any humour, and despite it being a bit 'obvious' I do expect a bit of humour when reading a Dawn French book.

The plot lacked any intrigue and it was only at half way through the book that any real plot holding the book together emerged.  Before that it was simply a lot of random visits to Silvia by random relatives.  By the end of the book some of Silvia's personality traits had been explained through past events but if you'd blinked you'd have missed these links.
I didn't find the characters very relate-able and some, such as Cat, were just over the top.

What annoyed me most about this book was the amount of underlining that went on, nearly every other word was underlined which seemed quite unnecessary and got a bit repetitive.

The best thing about this book has to be the cover, which I loved, but unfortunately isn't enough to make a good book.  I'm a big Dawn fan, I love The Vicar of Dibley and have seen French and Saunders Live more than once but unfortunately, this isn't a read I would recommend,  If you do want to try some of Dawn's reading I would suggest you start with her first novel, A Tiny Bit Marvellous.

Title: Oh Dear Silvia
Author: Dawn French