A Tourist's Guide to Glengarry

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.

Nine-year-old Neil McDonald has always wanted to write a book. Every time he tries, though, it comes out ‘like the Hardy Boys or something’. But when a maverick substitute teacher challenges him to record all the events and thoughts of a single day, the doors of creativity swing open. It helps that the day in question is, in Neil’s words, ‘pretty weird’. The time is the fall of 1971; the setting is lsquo;North America’s northernmost Metropolis’. The cast includes Neil, his best friend Keith and his gnome-like baba, a budding Black Power advocate, the heavy-smoking son of anti-war activists, and a very small boy wielding a very large axe in a public park. Neil thinks his day will climax with the broadcast of the first night game in World Series history, but what he’s in for is something much deeper, a surprise that will teach him much about the world and his place in it. In the end, Neil has his book. And it’s nothing at all like the Hardy Boys.