[.ca] A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry (ISBN 0889842469)

Amazon.ca:
Neil McDonald is the most eloquent nine-year-old you've ever heard. He's the narrator of Ian McGillis's captivating first novel, A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry, and he's had quite a rough day--encounters with drugs, booze, petty crime, teenage Italian girls, the threat of expulsion from school, enraged nuns, Black Sabbath, and puppy love are only a few of his worries. Set in 1971 Edmonton, a milieu that offers an uneasy blend of the cosmopolitan and the parochial, A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry offers a guileless account of young Neil's adventures, which involve a rapid-fire series of surprises, belly laughs, and kidney punches. McGillis's graceful touch is the mysterious factor that makes A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry such enchanting reading. He always knows just how far to push his narrative: never too cute or too cloying, never didactic in its engagement with politics and sociology, and charming enough to lure even a hardened W.C. Fields admirer into the world of its boy hero. The western provinces have lately proven to be fertile ground for this sort of book--Grant Buday's A Sack of Teeth and Don Dickinson's excellent Robbiestime spring to mind. A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry is the most benign of these novels, but it's also the most memorable. Don't miss it. --Jack Illingworth

Funny, smart, and observant:
I rarely read books about kids, and enjoy them even more rarely. But this one came highly recommended by my (adult) daughter, so I had to read it - and couldn't put it down. If you like Garrison Keillor, you'd love Ian McGillis : for his sharp eye, his hilarious yet down-to-earth prose, his intimate knowledge of and intimate relationship with a working-class suburb of Edmonton where he grew up. But if you hate Garrison Keillor, you'd love Ian McGillis anyway, for his prose is more light-hearted and structured, that is, much easier and more entertaining to read. Every baby boomer would instantly recognize those fabulous times when CCR were at the peak of their fame, when Black Sabbath and Jethro Tull were still a novelty (McGillis writes about them all), when a dime bought you a set of baseball cards, and when school violence was unheard of - so kids were freer to discover themselves, the world around them, and their place in it. Yet Glengarry is not your average North American suburb: it's in Alberta, so many characters bear East European, often Ukrainian names, and are colorful in their own unique ways waiting to be discovered by the reader. A truly delightful book!