"Carol Henn has written a beautiful book that takes her life experiences, fictional worlds, and observations, and transports you to a place called Bethlehem in Pennsylvania. Part lush fiction, novella, and memoir, Carol weaves masterful tales in celebration of her roots, family life, and love that will delight readers everywhere."
- Adriana Trigiani,
New York Times best-selling author of BIG STONE GAP
"Carol Henn's Oilcloth Stories capture life in the shadow – economic, social, emotional, and cultural – of a giant steel mill. The characters are fresh and vivid. The events brim with life's lessons and meaning. The recounting is sensitive, insightful, and presented with exquisite craftsmanship."
- Tim Mead, award-winning outdoor writer and photographer;
author of QUETICO ADVENTURES
"Oilcloth Stories bring back the nearly forgotten world of South Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, the home of Bethlehem Steel, but they do more than that. In her uncanny recollections of a child's view of so many things – restaurants and ice cream parlors; bedrooms lit by blast furnaces; small but abundant backyard gardens; the men and women whose emotional wounds she already, preternaturally, understood as a child – Henn evokes tender stories of early and mid-20th century American life. These stories are a loving tribute to Henn's own beloved family, and to the many immigrant families who filled the neighborhoods and workplaces of Bethlehem. They are also a rare gift to us, her readers."
- Joyce Hinnefeld, author of IN HOVERING FLIGHT,
STRANGER HERE BELOW, and TELL ME EVERYTHING
"The little distortions that fiction writers make of their perceptions are used to bring us closer to the truths of our lives, those otherwise untellable truths of our emotional experiences. Carol Henn has used her remembered past – the experience of Middle European immigrants striving to build lives in a Pennsylvania industrial town at mid-century – to create a narrative web of characters who remind us with a visceral vividness why people came here and why they continue to come. Her prose captures a time and a feeling denied even to photos of the period."
- G. Bruce Boyer,
author of GARY COOPER - ENDURING STYLE