Carol Naylor's REVIEW it...

  "I am everything you ever feared in your life. Someone would pay one way or another for the filth and humiliation suffered. Bitter Sweet Revenge."   Rosalind McKinley is a tough 28 year old cookie, ambitious and extremely determined to leave her unhappy past well and truly behind her in Indiana and an abusive, sexist lout of a father unwittingly following in sister Shirley's footsteps who had long since escaped this drudgery.   Both girls carry a family portrait, sentimentally showing two young girls standing in a park, one 5 years of age the older one, 15. A lifelong bond and inevitably, essential to the plot and the thriller element of this story. Will they meet up and be reunited?   Rosalind undergoes a dramatic transformation: a new persona emerges with a "tinge of quality for a woman of obvious quality." Leonora Carrington-Jones' love affair with Manhattan, New York begins at the salubrious C arlisle hotel, synonymous with wealth and ...

" So many secrets, lies and burdens of shame. The truth was like the tide: no matter how far it might ebb, it would always make a return." One of those easy reads but infuriatingly incredible to believe. Lies, deception and hypocrisy emerge to shatter the cosy existence of Eva, a famous ex-model living in the lap of luxury having shunned the limelight. The reason? The book begins by disclosing details about a vicious knife attack by a psychopathic maniac who had been stalking the beautiful Eva during the height of her fame. The attack was barbaric and life-threatening more so because Eva was pregnant at the time. She was fighting for her life but miraculously survived to give birth to a son. She was left badly disfigured. "There were so many of them, cruel jagged gashes torn into the flawless fabric of her skin, grinning, like silent, gruesome mouths." Eva's cold-hearted and selfish rejection of her son, unable and unwilling to love and cherish him resul...

                                                                    google images "This can't happen to me................ But it can, and it did, and it does." "So malignant, so cruelly and destructively greedy as it gnaws and destroys; the most dread of all diseases." Jack Hawkins' autobiography was written towards the end of his life and published shortly after his death and my gratitude is that we still have a personal record of a remarkable, understated man who was a brilliant actor, so versatile in the roles he chose and working with other equally famous heart-throbs such as Peter O'Toole, Omar Sharif, John Gielgud and Lawrence Olivier. The list...

His kiss was so intense, so carnal, so prolonged that my body was startled by it, ready to melt and be transformed into a puddle of honey. This wonderfully exciting story is set during the Spanish civil war and moves into the second world war. Duenas spent some time researching the period thoroughly and she has successfully managed to integrate historical characters such as Franco, Beigbeder and Serrand Suner into a compelling fictional novel about a young seamstress known as Sira which chronicles more than six turbulent years in which her mettle is tested and she develops a resilience and courage to outwit adversity. An incredible transformation from a naive 12 year old living in the poorer quarters of Madrid with many constraints placed on her, fatherless, growing into a wiser, self-assured woman with determination to succeed as a business woman. Within the novel, the protagonist Sira proves a testimony to bravery and determination. By the end of this epic novel, she feels m...

In line 8 he uses "fickle" a word that means changeable. If a person is fickle he does not have strong loyalties to one person and may fall out of friendship as easily as he falls into it. "Freckled" is another marking (seen on the face and neck), usually it is the sun (during the summer) that will cause the freckles to be visible. Once the summer ends the freckles will fade until the following year.People with light skin or red hair are prone to develop them. Hopkins uses parenthesis and a rhetorical question:"Who knows how?" We don't know how things come about. The poet is referring to lines 7 and 8 but he could also be talking about lines 1-8. In line 9 Hopkins uses words that contrast, three pairs of words, perhaps to develop his point about "counter." He uses alliteration of the s sound with movement, first of all: "swift" (quickly) compared to "slow" the opposite. Then he uses tastes (sensory words): "swee...

Glory be to God for dappled things- For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow; For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut falls; finches wings: Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough; And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim. All things counter, original, spare, strange; Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?) With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim; He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise him. The poem was published in 1918 although it was written in 1877. Hopkins was a Victorian poet who achieved fame when he died (posthumously). It is presented as a compressed sonnet or a curtal sonnet of 11 lines as opposed to a traditional 14-lined sonnet. A traditional sonnet is a love poem and Hopkins' poem is similar in that it praises God for the beauty of nature, it shows his appreciation and acknowledges that God is the creator ("he fathers-forth") of this beauty so he praises him. ...

"I think we make for peculiar refugees, running from our own blood, or towards our own blood." The Gathering is an extremely dark reflection of the protagonist's insecurities, especially guilt after the suicide of Liam, her closest brother in age and affections. The experience unsettles Veronica who plunges into the depths of despair and misery. It is a difficult book to read because it shows the disintegration of the human psyche through bereavement and what we are left with is the guilt and remorse. It contains many emotional truths which your average reader will find uncomfortable and distressing. Enright won the Booker Man prize for this novel and yet many reviewers have been extremely critical of the book. I suspect that it is the worrying veil of darkness that hovers from start to finish. What I find interesting is the diversity of reactions but isn't that the whole point of reading and reviewing? Wouldn't it be tedious if we always agreed? As sibling...