Atti R. (RoyalScatterbrain) -
From Library Journal
The relationship between the sexes is one of fiction's well-mined veins, but this collection strikes gold when it focuses on people "with their stories locked inside themselves." A teenaged daughter watches from the sidelines as her parents' marriage disintegrates. An adolescent boy gropes for an understanding of the man he will become. A co-ed reaches vainly through the darkness as her lover plunges to his death in a gorge. Huddle unlocks these characters' stories with a deft narrative touch, sensitive to the evocative details of emotion and conflict. Less successful, though, are the lapses into campus fiction. The English-professor-as-aging-satyr theme smells as stale as faculty lounge air. But the breeze outside the ivory tower is bracingly fresh, and it gives Intimates strength to rise above this shortcoming. Recommended for larger collections.
The relationship between the sexes is one of fiction's well-mined veins, but this collection strikes gold when it focuses on people "with their stories locked inside themselves." A teenaged daughter watches from the sidelines as her parents' marriage disintegrates. An adolescent boy gropes for an understanding of the man he will become. A co-ed reaches vainly through the darkness as her lover plunges to his death in a gorge. Huddle unlocks these characters' stories with a deft narrative touch, sensitive to the evocative details of emotion and conflict. Less successful, though, are the lapses into campus fiction. The English-professor-as-aging-satyr theme smells as stale as faculty lounge air. But the breeze outside the ivory tower is bracingly fresh, and it gives Intimates strength to rise above this shortcoming. Recommended for larger collections.
