Scratched Enamel Heart is a collection of twenty-four short stories by Amanda Huggins, recent winner of the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry collection for The Collective Noun for Birds (Maytree Press, 2020).
‘Where the Sky Starts,’ the first story in the collection, opens with a beautifully descriptive sentence: 'If you stood on the pier with your back to the sea, looked beyond the beached fishing cobbles, past the cottages, away to the south of the steelworks, you would see a bright green ribbon of land.' This sets the tone for the entire collection, which is rich in description of setting, whether it be the 'golden domes gleam[ing] under a bright autumn sky' in Russia (‘Nothing like Letter to Brezhnev’) or 'the manicured profile of each tree mirrored in the still water until a single dappled fish broke the surface' in Japan (‘A Potential Husband’).
Themes running throughout are love and loss, often teetering on a knife’s edge between the two. In ‘Part of Sami, Part of Malik,’ Malik cares for Sami like a son even though they 'hadn’t known each other back home,' but when Sami’s mother resurfaces 'Malik began to drown in the ocean of blood pounding in his ears.' In ‘Uncanny,’ Alan has his hopes raised by a waitress in a café, only to have them dashed again. The tension between the couple in ‘Listing’ is immediately apparent, their 'smiles brittle' as they eat 'overcooked sole and yesterday’s bread.'
Interspersed with the longer stories are flash fiction stories, tight and terse, capturing pivotal moments in the characters’ lives. In two of the flash fiction stories, ‘Strong, Not Rough’ and ‘Pretty,’ the main characters are young and Huggins has captured teenage angst and inadequacy to perfection.
Scratched Enamel Heart is a beautiful collection that will take you on a journey through time, across land and sea, and deep into the hearts of her characters.
About the reviewer
Laura Besley writes short fiction in the precious moments that her children are asleep. Her fiction has appeared online, as well as in print and in various anthologies. Her flash fiction collection, The Almost Mothers, was published in March 2020. She tweets @laurabesley
You can read another review of Scratched Enamel Heart on Everybody's Reviewing here.
This beautiful collection from Amanda Huggins is a lyrical journey of delicate devastation. Each story is told in exquisite detail, sparking the senses so the reader really feels the ‘soft rabbit-skinned’ gloves in 'Violet Flint and the Softest Blue,' tastes the bitterness of the bourbon in 'A Brightness to It,' and sees with startling clarity the stray dog, Hal, with his paw aloft silhouetted against the dawn sky in 'Red.'
Huggins effortlessly carries the reader from the North coast of England to the heat of India, from a farmhouse in small town USA to the bustling streets of London and yet, despite the many varied settings, the themes remain universal and instantly recognisable. Each story resonates with the reader because Huggins writes with such compelling precision about grief, hope, loss, yearning, fear and love in all its complexities.
The opening story, 'Where the Sky Starts,' has such pastoral beauty, so incongruous against the central themes of death and the cyclical drudgery of poverty. The gentle and yearning Rowe dreams of escape from the steelworks, herring fishing and the weight of responsibility. Rowe’s final act of wilful resistance to an inevitable life, leaves the reader reeling with hope.
'Red,' which was shortlisted for the Costa Short Story Prize, follows. It's a searing story, saved from overwhelming the reader with its brutality, by its wonderfully redemptive ending: 'Mollie hated the dark, brooding weight of the house, the trees so dense they held a part of the night’s heart within them even when the sun shone.' Mollie’s sinister new stepfather Sherman Rook threatens Mollie and her mother in the most terrible of ways. Her only friend is Hal, the stray dog she befriends. Mollie learns that sometimes we must leave behind those we love most in order to save ourselves.
The title story, 'Scratched Enamel Heart,' is utterly mesmerising. This utterly original and compelling story tells of a refugee, Maya, who holds onto her past with her grief bound tightly into the leather plaited bracelet she wears: 'She picked up the owl with the scratched enamel heart and thought of her father. Always wise, yet unable to hide his feelings even when it was dangerous. He wore his heart on his sleeve for the world to see. The cat was her mother: green-eyed, independent and fierce, and the dolphin was her baby sister, always down at the river, swimming, diving, laughing, forgetting to come home in time for supper.'
The collection is interspersed with some taut and sinister flash fiction pieces, such as 'Tiger' and 'Pretty,' both of which pack just as powerful a punch as the longer stories, and 'Strong not Rough,' a tiny story which demonstrates the sheer weight and power of teenage longing, in just a few lines.
I adored these short stories; each one can be read and re-read and still you will find something new each time. Prepare for your heart to be scratched and yet, thankfully, not quite broken, with this gorgeous collection.
About the reviewer
Kathy Hoyle is an MA graduate from the University of Leicester. Her short stories and flash fiction have appeared in a variety of literary magazines such as Virtualzine, Silver Apples, Reflex Fiction and Another North. She was shortlisted for the Exeter Short Story Prize, the Fish Memoir Prize and the Ellipsiszine Flash Fiction Collection Prize. She is currently working on her first novel.
