Product Description

This book is a tribute to a real neighbourhood at a special point in time -- working class north Edmonton on the cusp of the oil boom. McGillis has drawn partly on figures from his own late 60s, early 70s childhood, including a maverick substitute teacher with a predilection for Eastern philosophy, a nine-year-old champion of civil rights, a chain-smoking ten-year-old son of anti-war radicals and baseball immortal Roberto Clemente.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #346094 in Books
• Published on: 2002-11-15
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .66" h x 5.60" w x 8.88" l, .77 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

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

Review

` ``Weird'' and ``neat'' are neutral adjectives, but they betray something fundamental about Neil. Together they describe a sense of wonder, which often goes understated, and a certain ambivalence, the root of which is tolerance. With these two words, McGillis keeps himself and his readers on track, and in a genre which too often cedes artistic integrity to cliché, he refrains from playing the judgement card like a phony.'

(Andrew Steinmetz Books in Canada )

`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.'

(amazon.ca )

`Yann Martel loves A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry. In his cover blurb, the Booker-winning novelist compares it to the work of J. D. Salinger and Mark Twain. Martel's invocation of these particular giants is not just a generous response to a good book. It aptly reflects Ian McGillis's particular knack: piercing the armoured adult's heart with the green arrow of a child's.

`Following an especially challenging day in the Edmonton suburb of Glengarry, nine-year-old Neil McDonald is urged by an eccentric teacher to record, as a writing exercise, everything that has happened to him since he tumbled from bed that morning. He does, and his singular diary forms the body of this debut, a dispatch from a mind still capable of wonder, yet sprouting tiny shoots of wisdom.

`Neil's prose cuts a finer line than you might expect, even from an exceptional nine-year-old. This small stretch ensures the book's success. Before you can figure out quite what McGillis is up to, what buttons he's pushing, he's suddenly refiring a host of dormant neurons. The results are sad and exhilarating at the same time -- sadness for time's march, exhilaration for such rare expression. It feels like learning all over again how to see the world and us in it -- how to share, to err, to rue and to move on.'

(Jim Bartley Globe and Mail )

`A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry may do for Glengarry what Mark Twain, Margaret Mitchell, or William Faulkner did for the South.'

(Barry Hammond Legacy )

Trevor Ferguson, author of The Timekeeper
`If the memory of childhood has lapsed, let this book be the antidote. A day in the life of a kid has never been so exquisitely ... portrayed.'