A Tiny Bit Marvellous by Dawn French

Linda chose A Tiny Bit Marvellous because she loves Dawn French (who doesn't) and had read her memoir Dear Fatty.

It was a small bookgroup gathering with only half of our membership attending. Three of us had read the book, two didn't quite finish and one had read a completely different book (Dear Fatty) by mistake! One other member had read the book and emailed comments in.

Nevertheless it was a great discussion. Starting with watching the youtube videos uploaded to advertise the book we discussed whether people would read the book just because it was written by Dawn French? We decided yes, such is the good feeling about her. However, we also noted that the cover to the book is extremely appealling; and given that covers are very important in attracting people to books a % of people would likely have chosen the book this way.

It fascinated us that Dawn French doesn't own a computer and that she still writes out longhand. Simone said this is quite common for writers as the slower process of longhand gives the author more time to consider his or her words than modern keyboard typing.

We then digressed to a discussion about the teaching of touch typing in schools. We argued that if cursive writing was going to be eliminated from the curriculum because our children were going to grow up using computers then touch-typing should be a compulsory element of the school curriculum. We all lamented that while our children were reasonable typists they had poor technique which will trip them up later on. Many of us had tried to teach our children touch-typing but no matter the program used it was like learning an instrument - unless they practise and are prepared to go through all the boring repetitive bits they soon lose interest.

Back to talking about the book we universally disliked the Dora's 18 yo character. Many of us are mothers of teenage girls and secretly hope that our daughters are nothing like Dora in a few years time. Does Dora represent a composite of the teenage girls we know - we didn't think so. If this is a composite of teenage girls in modern Britain then we were horrified.

Largely we decided that this was not a book we would recommend others to read and this was reflected in the scores which ranged from 5-6 with a single outlying score at 8.

Average score: 5.9

Our next book is Before I Go to Sleep by S J Watson. Some pre-reading to get you started:

http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/books/in-memory-of-a-working-mum-20110721-1hpg9.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/apr/16/before-i-sleep-sj-watson-review