This book follows Silvia Shute, who is currently in a coma in hospital after falling three floors from her balcony. Some of the characters are hilarious, Tia is her cleaning, proud and very funny in some of her chat and outlook on matters.

Cassie has a lot of trouble and self-doubt about coming to her mother's hospital bed but when she finally succeeds in getting there, she is very vocal about her issues with her mother. I actually liked Cassie's character and had immediate sympathy for her but my problem with her character was the timeline. The housekeeper Tia almost seemed like an irrelevant character only brought in to show cultural diversity and an extra point of view. It is also about relationships and family, huge focus on both, with Sylvia being in a coma, all the characters address all their issues with her in a very honest and raw emotive way. Then, there were other aspects which really irritated me, such as the VERY OVERUSED dialect of Winnie.When Dawn French wrote her first novel A Tiny Bit Marvellous I was eager to read it, looking forward to plenty of silly humour and those elusive-when-reading out loud laughs. Throughout her time in hospital, she is visited by family, her best friend, her ex-husband, her nurse, and her cleaner. Speechify lets you listen to any text, including all books in the world with the best voices out there! The threads of all the different stories come together to a satisfactory and quite bittersweet conclusion. Each character talks to Silvia in her coma, their stories all seen from her hospital bed (including occasional clunky exposition but that can e forgiven).

Additionally, it's hard to believe that each one of these characters would speak aloud and at such length to the comatose Silvia - pouring out their thoughts and dreams in a busy hospital. I really wanted to like this book and in fact I had mentioned it enough times that my boyfriend bought this for my 21st birthday (3 years ago, oh my goodness). I got on with it much better than I normally would a book where I don't really identify with, or like, the characters appearing early on, but a lot of them were very cariacatured (Tia especially), which grated for a while.The eponymous Silvia is lying in hospital in a coma after having fallen off her balcony, landing three floors below. The book is a mix of humour, sadness, tough issues, abuse, possessiveness, relationships, violence, suicidal intentions. I wished for a little less use of dialect in the nurse looking after Silvia, though I have to admit the housekeepers malapropisms (due to her sons teaching her the wrong words in English) were hilarious. for me, a very mixed bag and whilst there are a fair few characters, each chapter is titled with their name so it is very easy to follow.

The concept of a person being multi-faceted was interesting, but it just didn't come across well in the book. The sister is a hippy who wants to burn sage and place crystals everywhere and is totally clueless about normal human social interaction.In her career spanning three decades, she has been nominated for six BAFTA Awards and also won a Fellowship BAFTA along with her best friend Jennifer Saunders. Dawn French is a person that almost everyone knows and a person who a lot of people love, simply for her ability to make you laugh. It may not necessarily be racist, but the idea of white middle class Dawn French sitting and typing out how she thinks a Jamaican lady will say things. Add to that the fact that Winnie and Tia are both written in phonetic Jamaican and Asian accents, which comes across terribly. But then we find out that the end of the marriage was precipitated because Silvia helped Cat dispose of her dead husband’s body, which happened three years ago, so Cassie can’t have been kicked out over four years ago.