According To Yes - Dawn French
“....get a move on, pal, life goes on happening while you're hiding....” ― Dawn French, According to Yes
According to Yes is the third work of fiction published by my personal hero, Dawn French. I bought it at the same time as Uprooted (which explains why it’s taken me so long to write a post about it, as I’m still recovering from how good that was) after months of debating whether or not to pick one up. I love her, loved her writing (loved her choice to cast Richard Armitage as her love interest in the Vicar of Dibley, excellent work Dawn), love her sense of humour. But none of them really appealed to me, the genre and general plot just didn’t seem like something I would enjoy. So I dithered, as I am very good at doing, before finally deciding to grab it as part of a deal at Waterstones.
Here’s the thing. The writing, I very much enjoyed. French writes funny, effervescent characters that are very relatable, and when you’re reading her story you can easily see how this plot was imagined in the mind of the woman who played Geraldine Granger. But I just don’t think the intended audience was someone in my age range.
The story’s about a middle aged, typical Dawn French-style character who winds up in New York working as a sort of live-in nanny for an incredibly wealthy, incredibly posh and restricted family on the Upper East Side. Said family consists of the matriarchal grandmother, who likes expensive and likes it her way. Clash is inevitable. There’s her husband, big CEO rich man, who’s pretty laid back and just wants to avoid conflict with his wife. Their son, recent divorcee and general slob, and his three boys. The oldest is in his late teens and determined to avoid the path set out by his grandmother so plays guitar and (I’m assuming) has a shaggy haircut. And the two other boys are still young and really just want ice cream. Luckily, ice cream is our heroine’s forte.
This kind of plot is really not my type of thing at all, but I was enjoying the writing style and general happy go lucky feel of it all, so I stuck with it. But then things got odd very quickly and it just became something that I was reading so it would be finished rather than anything else. Spoiler, in case you wanted to read it, but the main character sleeps with the grandfather, the father and the teen son. That’s right. She sleeps with one man from every generation in the family. Then, all of a sudden, she’s pregnant and surprise! No one knows who the father is. It goes down with the matriarchal, intense grandmother about as well as you’d expect.
I will say that the ending was very heart warming, and very sweet. But overall, I just don’t think it’s a novel aimed at me. Will this stop me loving Dawn French? Not on your life. Will it stop me obsessively watching the Handsome Stranger episode of The Vicar of Dibley? HA. Pull the other one.