Front Porch Mannequins

"There they are again - Nan and Lily and Alice, sipping Joy Juice on Alice's front porch. It's the middle of the afternoon. And it's the middle of the week. And who's that with them, the stiff one with the pouting lips? That's Delane, Alice's mannequin, all dressed up and nowhere to go. Not that the others have anywhere to go in Augustine, Ontario. Nan and Lily and Alice are a troubled trio, each more eccentric than the next, each trying to escape her own demons. If only they had Delane's serene existence.
But they don't. Nan concocts a scheme to run Lily over with her car to restore Lily to her husband Mark's affections. It doesn't work. "Then Daryl brings Alice a trophy - a severed hand he's found in the middle of the highway - hoping to restore himself to her affections. Oddly, that works. But then Detective Harris Cool arrives. Lily has disappeared.
Jolted from their front porch indolence, the women are at last forced to face the complexities of their tortured pasts. Prompted by Cool - a man with his own secrets - Nan and Lily come to a startling truth about their fraught relationship, while Alice - the new girl in town - awakens to a fresh recognition of life's purpose. And Delane? Delane remains serene, a front porch mannequin forever.

Rebekkah Adams is an Owen Sound, Ontario writer whose short fiction, poems, and journalism have appeared in such publications asFireweed, Canadian Women's Studies Journal, and the Georgia Straight. A graduate of the Humber School for Writers program, she is the author ofGlass Houses: Saving Feminist Anti-Violence Agencies from Self-Destruction (2008), a critique of governance and internal conflict in anti-violence agencies. A front-line worker and manager for over twenty years in shelters for women and children, she is currently a counselor in private practice. Front Porch Mannequins is her first novel.