"Mason spins a narrative as large an energetic as her heroine, and just as filled with passion and conflict. Roiling, larger-than-life Dee has not only her own story to tell, but the story of a whole generation. Perhaps some childhoods are all sunshine an success, but for the rest of us, Last Summer At Barebones delivers a wonderfully compelling, over-the-top reminder of what youth is really like: part nightmare, part paradise. The characters she writes about are, in all their freakishness, our very own."
-The Toronto Star
"Last Summer at Barebones is funny, poignant and unsentimental. Baker Mason creates sympathy for her characters by portraying them as realistic and complex, instead of simply puching the right emotionsal buttons. This first novel is hard to put down."
-The Kingston Whig-Standard
"Perfectly voiced and beautifully shaped, its structure an emotional time-bomb, it's one of the most assured and auspicious debuts I've read in years... .Mason's characters will likely live on in yours long after the book is closed."
— The Globe and Mail
"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."
— Ottawa Sun
"A magical novel. Last Summer At Barebones is so good that those who love both fine fiction and cottage life should buy a copy of this big, fat paperback novel, putting it away until the summer. And then read it on a dock during a hot Juky afternoon."
- The Sun Times
"Last Summer at Barebones captures all the awkwardness of adolescence: the humour, pain, imagination, and desire, but most of all the fear that you're not "normal" like other people. Diane Baker Mason's heroine, Dee Graham, is too big for her age, too smart for her peers, and exactly like every one of us who ever felt different and alone at age 13."
— Erin McMullan, The Muskoka Times
"Diane Baker Mason is one of the reasons Canadian literature is turning into a feast for the troubled soul. Her writing is bright, new and colourful.... Last Summer at Barebones, brings us characters who ride into your life fully realized aboard a voice that is irresistible. In particular, the two sisters, Dee and Theresa, remind us of the best and the worst in our natures, our ability to be loving and murderous with equal relish."
— Joseph Kertes, Director of Humber School for Writers and winner of the Leacock Prize For Humour for Winter Tulips
"Mason is covering familiar ground here, but she manages to do so with some page-turning panache that evokes not only Dee's adolescent suffer, but also the unique family dynamic that emerges on summer vacations. The ending...does not shy away from...catharsis -- a move Oprah would no doubt applaud."
— Quill & Quire
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