Carol Naylor's REVIEW it...

                                    Smile by Deborah Moggach. "Through a fog of early morning sickness I'd carry out the plates of scrambled eggs."Cheer up," he said. "It might never happen." "I thought it has." This collection is composed of 11 short stories examining marriage and modern families, insecure and generally unhappy. In some cases freedom and divorce are feasible alternatives to an empty and unfulfilled life. In Smile imagine the workers in a hotel having to wear badges that simply read Smile. The hotel was American so perhaps this explains it? Sandy, the narrator was 19. Formerly known as Alexandra, we learn that she changed her name when she was 12. She has been in and out of care homes since her dad walked out on her at the tender age of 4. A damaged young lady. She seems attracted to older men, one in particular "who never turned up, married and based in Huddersfi...

                        My Gentle War. Memoir of an Essex Girl by Joy Lennick . Alien birds gargantuan/Spewed fire-sent seagulls/Scattering to hover low-Chilling their white underbellies/On the grey, choppy waves.    In a Village Sky.1941 . Joy Lennick makes it clear that her temporary stay on Mountain Hare and its ominous coal slag, looking down on Merthyr Tydfil was a treasured time in spite of being separated from her family. Her childhood memories were ones of kindness, curiosity and hostility: " as the years multiply, it seems to spin like a giddying, gaudily colourful tin top from my childhood." The 1930s were eventful years probably for all the wrong reasons. Regarded as the grimmest years since the end of WW1 “unwept, unhonoured and unsung” it is a naive statement to say that this was a wonderful time to be born. It wasn’t. Remember the Hindenberg disaster, Hitler as German Chancellor, the Japa...

                 An Essex Girl on the Costa Blanca by Jo Black. "Call her a bitch, slut, whore but never tell a woman she's fat, especially an Essex girl!" The book  was written to help raise money for Emaus children and a percentage of sales of this book will go to this charity. Imagine it's May 2005 and Michael is squeezed into a shoe-box sized toilet counting £50,000 in notes from a Tesco carrier bag. Talk about privacy. Jo Black had had her hairdressing salon for 10 years and had decided to sell without informing her staff officially. This money represented half of the payment up front and the remainder was to be paid that same afternoon once the contracts were signed. There had been two tax investigations so you can understand the need for caution and secrecy from the Inland Revenue. £100,000 was smuggled out of the country as the family set off on their adventure to Spain to live the dream. Sounds a bit corny nowadays...

.                                Elizabeth Is Missing by Emma Healey. "I've missed this tiny thing for nearly seventy years. And now the earth, made sludgy and chewable with the melting snow, has spat out a relic. Spat it into my hands. But where from?" It seems that Healey's paternal grandmother who had been showing signs of senility came out with the simple but inspiring phrase that prompted this debut novel: "My friend is missing." The critics loved it. I loved it. Healey didn't want it to be too bleak portraying a vulnerable octogenarian showing signs of dementia, trapped in a life of boredom and tedium: watching or attempting to watch  tv, attempting to read when the words don't make sense, waiting endlessly for the carer or the daughter. What a life! Nine publishers fought over its publication and the tv rights hav...

                  The Harlot's Garden by Nikki Dee. "I run a brothel, I sell babies and have offered protection to those you would see hanged, and you concern yourself with the way separating my boys will reflect on me." The story is set around 1774, mainly covering Worcester and constitutes Book 1 of the Sansome Springs Trilogy. The public hanging of Matthew Morgan in Red Hill had taken place a few years prior, in 1760. Simultaneously, his young bride Susan was giving birth to his twins: Ruby and Ellie to celebrate her widowhood. Note the irony! Looking after one unwanted baby for a young lass of 17 was more than enough but a second one? Susan asked her friend Ann to drown one of the babies but she refused. It was commonplace to abandon unwanted babies although Worcester saw a thriving trade in selling babies. Destitution, abandonment and being the mother of two unwanted babies without a husband to support her seemed like a de...

Time Does Heal.  A Collection of Poems by Julie Day. "Life has no meaning when it's devoid of love/ Love is, in fact, what we're all searching for." Julie Day enlightens us with an interesting and positive approach to the tragic end of a relationship and how to deal with the heartache. "Time will heal" is the ultimate answer, a reassurance that it does because for the writer, she has become whole once more.  And for anyone who has suffered similar break-ups you should feel reassured by this anthology of thirty short verses. Young teenagers embracing their first love affair, diving into the unknown with hormones racing all over the place will seek solace in the poet's advice: "Love yourself/ Love who you are/ Love to love/And you'll go far." Julie Day has plenty of gems to offer to ease the heartache so don't despair. She offers an abundance of sound advice. The verses are all extremely personal and document the stages o...

                             The Hundred Foot Journey. Film Review. "Food blends cultures and allows us to have just a little peek into someone else's life. It's about a hundred foot divide between cultures." (Oprah Winfrey) Hassan Kadam ( Manish Daval) is the "boy who knows." Put it another way to give you a clue. "He has it." He has a gift. Okay…The Kadam family flee their hometown of Mumbai after their restaurant was firebombed by a mob over an election dispute. Their livelihood is destroyed and tragically, their mama perishes in the fire. They seek asylum in Europe heading to London for a short while. They leave England disappointed and head into Rotterdam, gateway to Europe after Hassan's remark to the Immigration officer that "the vegetables have no soul, no life," in England. So much for English food. Dismissed like that. Mama Kadam had groomed him to replace her. "You cook to make ghos...