This is a story of modern family life, told through the diaries of three different members of a family. Mo, the mother and child psychologist, who is rapidly approaching fifty and stuck in a rut, and her two teenage children, Dora, who may have finally found a man worthy of her affections, but she has never met him, and Peter, who now wants to be known as “Oscar” after his idol, Oscar Wilde.

The mother is the most well-drawn character in this story and she falls into the far too well treaded cliché, the psychologist/psychiatrist who is unable to relate to their own children. The daughter and the son are so cliched that their characters chafed with me. The daughter was the stereotype of a teenage girl, every other word she wrote was “literally”. She seemed to have no other concern in her life than that she didn’t have a boyfriend. The son behaved like the cliché of an affected fifty-two year old gay man. His biggest desire was to get a smoking jacket. Even if he was hiding behind an affected exterior, as a defence against a homophobic world, would he keep this up in his own personal diary? But in this story, he seemed completely unaffected by any homophobia.

Dawn French has shown herself to be an insightful and talented performer. Unfortunately, I found so little of that in this novel. I wish she had used that insight here with her characters, instead of falling back on easy stereotypes and quick jokes. This was French’s first novel but I feel that it needed more work on it, more work on her characters and more work on a plot twist I saw coming far too early.

I wished that this book had been more than a tiny bit better.

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