Because of You is a thought-provoking read injected with a warmth we’ve come to expect from Dawn French. Featuring very strong women with fortitude and resilience it is a story filled with a great sense of love and remorse, of tolerance and forgiveness. Hope is the grieving mother and as she leaves the hospital, the grief hits her particularly hard. She is wobbly and bouncing off walls on her way out. She falls against the wall right at the room where the other mother and baby are - and she opportunistically grabs their child. The parents are sleeping.

I absolutely loved Because of You. Fantastic, passionate, compassionate, so much wisdom, a lot of humour, very real and credible BERNARDINE EVARISTO, Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other I think feeling sorry for Hope also came from knowing that Florence’s dad was a self-loving idiot who would have ruined his daughter’s life, just like he did his wife. I like the way that Dawn French kind of made him out to be the baddy in the book, and that he was an MP too. Oh my goodness. This was such an emotional read with a difficult subject at its heart but amongst the emotional turmoil there is humour too. Dawn French handles the story with warmth and somehow even though a wrong has been done, the leading female characters feel so credible that you really care about them. In fact they all have vivid personalities, including the minor characters. There are those like DI Thripshaw that provide the comedic and toe curling moments with his malapropisms and crassness whilst his colleague DC Debbie Cheese provides the empathy. Dawn French said in her interview that she wanted to explore the themes of nature vs nurture and loss. Honestly, the very thought of hinging the exploration of nature vs nurture on a stolen baby and a stillbirth makes me uncomfortable as a parent. The exploration of loss felt no more than a lip service as it seemed like the author wanted to generate warm feelings for Hope in the readers' minds, so she conveniently chose to sideline the grief of Anna. Maybe it's me, but I fail to see why there should even be an expectation of warm feelings here for someone who committed the unimaginable crime of stealing a newborn, no matter what circumstances drove her to do it or how much effort she put into raising that baby. As a parent, this not only felt disturbing to me but it also felt offensive. Obviously without giving the story line away, the premis of the book is the switched baby scenario. The writing in pleasant and engaging and it did hold my attention. However her narrative has more holes than my Granny's crochet blanket. She will have you believe that a baby is taken from a hospital, and the crime is being investigated by a lone detective sergeant and a couple of detective constables. Her treatment of the police is woeful and fuels prejudices that are quite unbecoming by authors of her caliber. I think she has relied solely on her fertile imagination in favor of any kind of research into police procedures' , or still birth hospital procedures.

I'm finding it difficult to distill what I thought about this story. The blurb says 'told with her signature humour, warmth and so much love'. And we can hear Dawn French's voice throughout. If you follow Dawn at all, you know what I mean. But I actually thought that hearing Dawn's 'voice' throughout was distracting. And the humour, such as it was in a difficult story such as this, was like 'cheap'. And I didn't laugh, and after the first couple of throw out lines, didn't even smile. It began to annoy me. year old Anna is a quiet and resolute person, unhappily married to Julius, an MP and a more obnoxious man you could not meet. An adulturer, pompous and narcissistic. The only person he loves is himself. She really wants this baby to have someone to love. There were too many plot holes in this for me to really enjoy it. The timeline didn't make sense. The crime was too glossed over to ever feel real, and the conclusion was eye rolling.

But the build up of the relationship between Hope and 'her daughter' and the way the reveal was dealt with and how the daughter was reunited with her biological mother was acceptable. The warmth of the mother / daughter relationship (with both mothers) was there and true to the Dawn we think we know.After five long years of waiting for a new novel, Dawn's millions of fans will fall in love with this tantalising story of motherhood.

Told with French's unfailing wit and warmth, Because Of You is the tale of family bonds and the mother-daughter relationships that ultimately make us who we are Independent The story begins on New Years Eve, on the cusp of a new millennium. Mothers-to-be Hope and Anna are in a London hospital giving birth however only one of them will leave with a baby. A bright, brilliant and heartbreaking tale of two mothers, two babies and the far-reaching consequences of one fateful day Yahoo! Style For eighteen years Hope kept the secret from everyone, not telling anyone her real daughter was stillborn and the daughter she has now, Minnie, isn’t really hers. But as time goes on Hope realises what she did was wrong and she needs to come clean, but what will happen to her perfect family once the world finds out?The final scenes are so perfectly executed they almost broke my heart. Because of You is a story to cherish Sunday Express