The Light-Fingered Gang.

Emily Walters Gregor is a graduate student in 20th-century American
literature and an ESL writing tutor at the University of Minnesota.

In 1912, Saskatoon is a boom town. Construction can’t keep up with demand, and new arrivals from all over the world arrive daily. In the midst of the chaos—highlighted by a typhoid epidemic caused by the makeshift plumbing arrangements established until infrastructure could catch up with growth—Mackenzie (Mack) Davis and his friends explore the city.

Mack witnesses the challenges of a quickly growing city—including instances of prejudice and racism as townspeople assign blame to one or another group of newcomers for crimes and outbreaks. Mack and his friend Albert find themselves in the middle of one such crime when they discover the hiding place of some local jewel thieves.

The Light-Fingered Gang is punctuated by brief articles from the Saskatoon Daily Phoenix, the paper for which Mack’s father works as a reporter. These stories are based on actual contemporary news reports. The articles provide additional historical context for the events of the story. Glaze brings to life the emergence of a Western Canadian city during this period, but as a character Mack functions more as a vehicle for the story than as a lens for the reader into that time and place. Recommended with reservations.