In this brilliantly told short story collection, David Updike portrays the multi-faceted nature of love and the human heart. From a father's painful realization his son has discovered the dark heart of racism still beats, to a quiet love affair that needs an audience to bloom, to the bumblings of a professor struck with rapture for his student, Updike portrays the intricacies of loving someone with candor and sincerity. He writes in the piece, "Kind of Love," "There were not different "kinds "of love, the argument seemed to go, but just one great and universal love, of which all the others were fragments, diffractions, variations on a theme..." Drifting from the unrequited to the secretive, the familial to the first poetic moments, this soulful collection leaves no avenue of expression untouched.