Documents

The Ottawa Sun -- Final
Showtime Sunday, September 2, 2001 S12

Books

COMING-OF-AGE TALE IMPRESSIVE
Don Ermen
Ottawa Sun

LENGTH: Medium

LAST SUMMER AT BAREBONES

By Diane Baker Mason

McArthur & Company

A sickly thin tabloid journalist, Dee Graham is a sleepwalking recluse who is trying to forget her past as a 13-year-old 253-lb. teen. One night, on break from an assignment to interview Siamese teens in Florida, Dee stops in at a comedy club. On stage is an obese woman who has stolen Dee's painful, tormented past and turned it into a comedy routine. After a few minutes, Dee discovers the comic is her older sister, the former beauty queen who tormented and ignored her baby sister. Dee stalks her sister and buys a gun, intent on killing her.

Wow. With a an opening like that, it's pretty hard to ignore Diane Baker Mason's debut novel, Last Summer At Barebones.

The story is about the last summer at the lake for Dee's family. Each summer, the Graham family rents a cottage on an island on Barebones Lake. For Dee, it's a refuge, a place to hide, to escape the cruelty of her life in the city.

Dee has always been fat. And she's always been teased. She can't walk to school without being taunted. She has no friends and she's not able to trust anyone who might reach out. Only one person does get through and that's Richard, a skinny kid with bottle-thick glasses who is picked on just as much as Dee.

They both come from dysfunctional families. Dee's father is a school janitor who keeps his wife trapped in the kitchen. Richard's mom is a sculptor and painter who can't understand her brainy kid. When Richard develops juvenile diabetes, he's the one who has to schedule the insulin injections and the special meals because to leave it to her would mean certain death. His father is a well-paid accountant who doesn't have a lot of time for his nerdy kid or his artsy wife.

By the time summer rolls around, Dee is 13, almost six feet tall and 253 lbs. The summer of 1970 is when things are supposed to change, when she escapes from her family and spends the rest of her life with Richard. Things do change, but not in the way Dee had planned. Richard, now 14, has grown. He's made friends and although he tries to bring Dee along, she sees his maturity and his good looks as a betrayal.

It's a brutal summer for Dee, and she's not the only one who experiences a metamorphosis. Her mother discovers she has a life outside the family home. Her brother David, an aspiring musician, leaves for good with secrets known only by a few.

It would be easy to describe the book as a coming-of-age story. But it's not necessarily a happy ending. Twenty-eight years later, the scars are still there for Dee, who has to finally confront the sister she hasn't seen for years.

It's here that the author falters. Although the book is meant to detail Dee's life as a child, the ending comes too quickly. When the sisters finally meet as adults, is it a new beginning or is it just a tidy way of wrapping up the childhood story?

Still, Baker Mason has written an impressive debut novel. The writing is crisp, the characters are believable and you can't help but be amazed at how the littlest spark can create such change in people's lives.

DOC. #: 20010902OS0690