In the best literary tradition, Cary Holladay"s fiction illuminates the universal in private moments. In "The Belle Glade," a young boy returns with his eccentric parents to their favorite---and now rundown---vacation spot. While struggling to understand his mother"s magnetic attractiveness, Eric meets Greta and her brother, two strange youngsters who seem to be part of the hotel"s landscape, and learns the gift of nurturing the desolate. In "Runaways," the narrator is initially jealous of a friend whose father romantically disappears in his hot-air balloon. She then constructs her own vision of this man--still flying higher and higher. The few stories she knew about him are incorporated into her fiction, until a history of their "relationship" grows into a sustaining, though one-sided, love. As Holladay"s characters engage in a timeless dance of intimacy, the stories in her collection reflect the graces and the grief of contemporary life. --Susan Swartwout