Naturally there's a wise and all-knowing grandmother whom all of them love and turn to for advice, a woman who manages to be hip while remaining empathic and right there with the home-baked goodies (recipes at the end of the book! Dem Vater bleibt nichts anderes übrig als die Scherben zusammenzukehren, wenn in der Familie wieder etwas zu Bruch geht. Then there is Dad, who is a background, steady character in the beginning, but you realise he loves his family and is actually the sanest of the bunch.

This is a tool to avoid using prose to set up scenes and describe the action, and it makes the book a bit like reading four different diaries at the same time. Dora is a nightmare daughter who truly believes she knows everything, hates and abuses everyone and leaves obscene messages on her mother's phone. I can't wait till her next book, dawn once again proves herself to be a brilliant, funny, clever lady who really knows what she is talking about!Mo laughingly ignores these, passing Dora's atrocious behaviour off as a teenage phase, because after all, Mo is a psychologist and no one can tell HER how the young mind works! Dawn's autobiography was so funny and I couldn't put it down and this book was the complete opposite. All in all the Battle family is one we have all heard of before, and for me there was little in originality in their characters and stories. in the process of writing a survival manual for parents of teens as she remains completely clueless about and/or at loggerheads with her own. She is best-known for starring in and writing her comedy sketch show, French and Saunders, alongside her comedy partner Jennifer Saunders, and for playing the lead role of Geraldine Granger in the sitcom The Vicar of Dibley.

I see enough selfishness in the world around me (and my own selfishness, which I try to not cultivate) to want to read about a family full of it and no one thinking there's anything wrong.Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. So lässt Dora zum Beispiel all ihren Frust in einer sehr schimpfwortlastigen Sprache ab, während ihr Bruder sich bemüht wie Oscar Wilde zu klingen. Der graue Alltag hat sie so sehr aufgesogen, dass kein Farbklecks mehr übrig blieb, an dem sie sich hätte erfreuen können. The text-speak, repetitive swearing language style gets a bit wearing after a while and more than once I found myself wanting to clip Dora round the ear and tell her to stop being such a cow, shake Mo for being totally unaware of what her family was going through and instead, fixating on a hopeless romance. Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a bad book by any means, it’s perfectly readable, and I wanted to love it so much, but it’s just not as good as I imagined it would be from someone as talented as Dawn.