Carol Naylor's REVIEW it...

                                           Still Alice. Film Review. "The art of losing isn't hard to master. So many things seem filled with the intent that their loss is no disaster." If we are defined by our intelligence, our language and articulation, then just imagine what it would be like to lose them all.  Julianne Moore, a versatile performer, dubbed the Queen of realism, won an Academy Award in 2015 for her portrayal of Alice Howland, the 50 year old linguistics' Professor from Columbia University, diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's, a rare familial type that meant her children stood a 50/50 chance of inheriting the gene. Recently we have seen a surge in films showing cancer victims as well as Alzheimer victims. Take for instance "The Fault in Our Stars" or "50/50" even "The Notebook" and "Away From Her." Then, of course there's John Bayley's sa...

                      All Bones and Lies  by Anne Fine. "No-one should be expected, for love or duty or anything else, to have to put up with  having their very sense of self being chipped away minute by minute." Let's pose this one to start with. How do you find a way through the frustrations of caring for an elderly relative, especially a difficult one, so that love, or whatever we want to call it can survive to the bitter end? More relevantly, is it possible? Anne Fine thinks so. I like the way she has presented the twins, Colin and Dilys, as different as chalk and cheese, one who decides to do right by Norah whereas the other sibling remains adamant in her choice not to have any more contact with her mother, feeling bitter and angry. A five year rift seems a long time especially when the mother is old and becoming frail. Colin, as the mediator, tries to persuade his sister to make the first move but fails mis...

" Of Course I Believe in Father Christmas" by Janette Davies and Friends. Dedicated to Maria Wilson and The Pink Ladies in recognition of their work to raise funds and awareness to beat cancer. I bet you thought that another Christmas was over for another year, didn't you? Well, not quite! This anthology of short stories covers a number of genres by local writers. I will donate my copy to any reader who emails me with name and address details. Drummond Marvin uses humour and a touch of the autobiographical with reference to park benches and sleeping rough. Enough said…. I get better protection from The Telegraph. I catch the flu with The Mirror. Imagine this conversation with a policeman after a gust of wind blew his bedding away and wrapped itself around a policeman! Our man was resting between jobs, having secured an audition for a speaking part for that same evening. We are taken back to December 1959, to a struggling actor with the princely sum of £...

                                The Farm by Tom Rob Smith. "He drove me to the madhouse. He said this is where I belong, in rooms next to people howling like animals." "The Farm" follows a similar pattern to many of the Scandi murder/mysteries: picturesque villages and isolated farms with bleak landscapes, taciturn patriarchs such as Hakan who dominates Elise his wife, Mia his adopted daughter and the entire community. He thrives on this power. We have an amateur sleuth plagued by her own nightmares seeking answers to the disappearance of a vulnerable child. Are we talking about murder or abduction? Smith presents us with stories within stories, multi-layered. Fascinating. You might remember Smith from " Child 44" (2006) one of a trilogy, the first ever thriller to be longlisted for the Man Booker Prize? Ridley Scott snatched up the film rights and the film has just been released (Autumn 2015)...

                          An Inspector Calls by J.B.Priestley. BBC1 Drama. 2015. "There are millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths, still left with us, with their lives and hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness all intertwined with our lives and what we think, and say, and do." I feel as if I've grown up with Priestley's play and it's not just my northern roots. When I went into teaching in the 1970s it was on the syllabus and it was a good choice to cover in our limited time for O level and GCSE. It is, after all, a short play, easy to read and study so not a particularly great challenge for most students.  It's now 2015 and Priestley's play is still on the literature syllabus and I still come across it in my capacity as an examiner. This adaptation was by playwright Helen Edmunson who develops the character of Eva Smi...

                             The Ex-Wives by Deborah Moggach. "He was an outcast, shivering in the cold whilst all over Britain loving families sat beside the fire opening presents and playfully trouncing each other at board games." It's the 1990s and you will be plunged imminently into the painful and complicated woes of an ageing actor known affectionately as Buffy. Russell Buffery. Apart from the occasion when he wallows in self-pity, he is amiable but absolutely hopeless. He is 61 years of age, a has-been who views himself as a "discontinued model consigned to the scrapheap." If you are feeling uncomfortable with that what about this one: like "an old pit pony put out to grass?" Penny informs us that he has a “bottomless capacity for self-deception” believing everything he wants to believe. “ They have to tell lies and believe them.” Things seem to be looking up for Buffy when he meets Celeste, ...

                The Glass Room by Ann Cleeves. "I never used to think like that. I never used to worry. Is that what violent death does to the people left behind? It makes us victims too, of our own anxiety." D.I. Vera Stanhope is an excellent detective, meticulous and thorough in her investigations but so difficult as a boss. Ask some of the key players in her team: Joe Ashworth, her sergeant or Holly, even Charlie. With them she can be frosty and sarcastic with high and unreasonable expectations.  She finds relationships difficult and doesn't like people who make demands on her time. Vera admits to being more scared of people when they are alive than dead. She detested her late father Hector who seemed to despise Vera just as much as she despised him and informs us that she is haunted by him with mutterings in her head late at night. Her clothes are generally from Oxfam and her furniture is old. She knows she is...