[close] In Last Summer at Barebones, Diane Baker's novel of a painful childhood leavened with dashes of humour, Dee Graham, a journalist now approaching middle age, writes for a gutter tabloid. We learn in the first line that she plans to shoot her sister, a standup comic with the stage name Vagina Dentata. As the headline in Dee's tabloid might read, Former Fat Girl Takes Her Revenge in Gory Shooting.

Much of the book is a flashback to the summer when Dee was 13 and her sister Teresa a gorgeous, popular girl of 16. As always, the family, led by "the Dad" and the girls' feckless, whited-out mother, spends the idyllic summer months in a primitive cottage on an island at Barebones Lake. Along with them, Mason has peopled her story with a number of memorable characters, including Dee's only friend, the diabetic Richard, and the boy's parents, seemingly mere caricatures of the early '70s, who still manage to come alive. Richard's right-wing father misleads the Dad, while his mother secretly infects all the women with the virus of her newfound feminism. In such a charged environment, the ever-present campfire isn't the only source of sparks. Dee, meanwhile, grows to enormous proportions and plots to escape the horrors of a world she can't face, while her sister tortures her in ways that are horribly typical. --Mark Frutkin