Colleen's Count

Rick Henry's little novel, Colleen's Count, Wednesday, August 16th, 1933, has a Joycean air and ear to it, a lightness in its depth, but only if Joyce had been a feminist living in the Adirondacks in the Depression era 30's. The title character is an Everywoman whose spirit, strength, and humanity ring true. Reading Colleen is like finding some precious object buried in rich mulch.

-Stuart Bartow




Rick Henry's short novel is a tour de force about women's lives in the Adirondacks in the 1920s and early 30s. Ostensibly about cars, it gradually reveals itself to be about those entwined eternal verities: sex, death and money. (And cars. And movies). Though slim, the book successfully brings to life an entire town, and era, as seen through the eyes of one woman, Colleen O'Shea Pierce, going about her day in 1933; in the process, she reveals herself to be far more Molly than Leopold Bloom. The book stays with you, troubling and disturbing, raising questions with no clear answers, much like life itself,

-Barbara Ungar