The Scarecrows of Necum Teuch

Ted McGee is an associate professor of English at St. Jerome’s
College, University of Waterloo.

The Scarecrows of Necum Teuch is a gallery of fictional portraits about
the scarecrows in the author’s yard in a village on Nova Scotia’s
eastern shore. Her focus on each figure provides the makings of a quaint
community (а la Road to Avonlea). She suggests storylines that might
develop for each of the figures (romance for the student preacher and
the schoolteacher, for example), but does not develop them. Not doing so
may help the author achieve her one purpose—to engage children’s
imaginations—but it also fragments the book, which contains, besides
the character sketches, a version of “The Legend of Necum Teuch,” a
tale about a skunk released in church, a very sketchy map, a recipe for
Kartoffel Soup, two poems, directions for “The Scarecrow Game,” and
instructions on how to make scarecrows.

Accompanying the text are photographs of the characters in their
settings. The use of photographs, however, creates a conundrum: the
naturalism of photography captures the scarecrows’ hard faces,
grotesque features, and awkward postures. These harsh qualities (made
harsher because many of the scarecrows were shot by sunlight) clash with
the soft nostalgia of the text. The scarecrows, perhaps because they
resemble mannequins, certainly because they appear here in neatly framed
color glossies, lack the imaginative appeal of straw figures when viewed
in a natural setting. Not a first-choice purchase.