“After finishing the last page of Rebekkah Adams' Front Porch Mannequins, I felt like getting in the car, braving the snow, and driving up the Peninsula to Tobermory. I didn't but I sure was tempted, wanting to see for myself the mood that Adams gives to this lands-end community in winter.

'Winter comes,' she writes, 'and the ferry that takes tourists over to Nippissing Island stops running for the season. The whole town shuts down. Restaurants nail sheets of plywood over their windows and lazy restaurant owners who owe their soul to the Royal Bank leave food to rot in their freezers over the long winter months. Within a frenzied twenty-four-hour period, all that remains is a ghost town, a community holding its breath until the next May.'

Rebekkah Adams is an Owen Sound writer whose previous work — short stories, poems, and journalism — have appeared in such literary magazines as Fireweed, Canadian Women's Studies Journal, and Georgia Straight. A graduate of the well-known Humber School for Writers, she has been a front-line worker and manager for over twenty years in shelters for women and children. Front Porch Mannequins is her debut novel.

I really didn't know what I was getting into when I opened this slight work of fiction, not much longer than a novella. Daryl Attridge, who works in a quarry on the Augustine Peninsula, is indifferently married to Alice White, late of the City of Toronto. He's lived in Augustine, a summer-time tourist playground at the tip of the Peninsula, all of his life except for the odd trips to Cabot Sound for movies or shopping.

Alice points out to Daryl that you can only leave town in one direction. South. 'It's true that Augustine is bordered on three sides by water and that the only highway, number 8, travels due south, more than eighty kilometers down the long finger of land to the bottom of the Augustine Peninsula. About halfway is the town of Sprucedale and at the end is the small city of Cabot Sound, but there isn't much in between. At the bottom, you're free to go in any direction, but until then it's south. You can only go south.'

Alice, who longs for the affection she doesn't get, has two friends, Lily and Nan, who both grew up in Augustine. Their families have lived on the Peninsula for years. Lily is married to Mark, who seems like a compilation of all the meanness there can be in a man. But still she yearns for his attention, so much that she talks Nan into running over her legs with a car in hope that he might notice her.

The pair agree that it seemed like a good idea at the time. After the accident, Nan takes a job at the Golden Mornings old-age home in Sprucedale where Lily's damaged mother is a resident. Crazy Carol, people call her.

Lily and Nan hang out on Alice's porch where, accompanied by Delane, a rather attractive mannequin, they drink and smoke and talk and scheme. 'On the porch, Alice and Nan are discussing the superficial. They complain about the weather, cuts to the health care system, Joe Gory's Rottweiler, yeast infection cream advertisements on television, that it's too cold to walk down to the docks, and how quickly eyebrows grow back after they've been plucked.' And then go their own way until the next day.

Nan, in particular, is an embodiment of this isolated outpost where everyone has a nickname, drinks to excess, and brawls around the family table at Christmas. After Nan's father is belted with a fireplace coal shovel, 'Nan watches as her father's body tumbles to the floor, his belly landing in the fancy orange jello salad that her mother reserved for card games and festive occasions. Some mandarin orange slices that had been suspended in the jelly fly through the air.'

On a cold night in winter, Daryl, who is on his way home, spots a hand lying on the roadway. 'It's a hand. Not a plastic Halloween costume hand or a prosthetic hand. It's a person's hand. He thought it was a glove at first, fingers stiff and curled, as if from years of wear. A Skidoo glove. But the fingers are too small and each twists a certain way. The colour is pale and bluish, like wild berry Fruit Bottom Yogurt.'

However, whose hand it is and how it got onto the road is something that you will have to find out for yourself. And I do urge you to follow the advice in the title of this column and Read This!

Some years ago, I read Carolyn Chute's small classic, The Beans of Egypt, Maine. It's also a novel about an isolated place and its mostly related residents. Chute's characters remind me of nothing more than Alice and Lily and Nan, Mark and Daryl and a detective named Harris Cool who chases after Lily when she disappears.

Adams, who must have spent some time up on the Bruce to so faithfully capture with such keen insight this sparsely populated corner of Ontario, has written a book with a difference. Front Porch Mannequins is a stunningly powerful first novel, a phantasmagorical tale. Somehow, Adams manages to make her characters seem like they are suddenly standing right in front of you, even if you wish they weren't.

Front Porch Mannequins is a novel for readers looking not just for a book that touches on the familiar but a work of literary merit. Yes, the novel does have its flaws, the main one being the length of the author's narrative. At book's end, I felt like Front Porch Mannequins was unfinished, that Adams had much more to say. And I hope she gets around to it soon with a second and more ambitious novel. But for now, this initial work of fiction will whet your appetite for more from Rebekkah Adams. ”

—The Owen Sound Sun Times