This is the story of Mo Battle, a child psychologist approaching fifty who doesn’t understand her own teenagers. The story is told in the format of a diary with the entries being written in turn from the perspective of Mo, her eighteen year old daughter Dora, and her sixteen year old son Peter. The storyline and general character base are an interesting depiction of modern family life and have the potential to be developed into an insightful and enjoyable read.
However poor character development, prose and narrative are the biggest let downs here. I didn’t expect the next great British novel from Dawn French, but I did expect some humour.
Dora, I imagine is based on Harry Enfield’s exaggerated teenager Kevin, Peter who is supposed to be obsessed with Oscar Wilde came across as arrogant and irritating and Mo, for a child psychologist, she seems to have absolutely no awareness of anyone around her. The only characters who had any depth and interest to them were the overlooked and neglected Husband and Grandmother, not just by the co-protagonists but by the author too.
The diary format, I personally felt was lazy. It failed to show any interaction between the characters, which when writing about the relationships in a family, should have been considered an important factor. An omnipotent, third person narrator would have suited this story much better.
Overall this was a boring, lazy use of cliché with an ending that could have saved the novel but was finished in too much of a hurry. Dawn French should either quit while she’s ahead or take some writing classes.
