A Year Down Yonder

A Year Down Yonder, Richard Peck’s coming-of-age story set in 1930s Illinois, is the acclaimed sequel to his Newbery Honor-winning 1998 novel A Long Way From Chicago and features some of the same characters, notably the mischievous but big-hearted Grandma Dowdel. While the two novels share a farcical, almost picaresque tone, they diverge in their choice of narrator: Whereas A Year Down Yonder follows the point of view of 15-year-old Mary Alice Dowdel, A Long Way From Chicago is narrated by her older brother, Joey. The earlier book is also more sprawling and episodic, chronicling the events of seven different summers, from 1929 to 1935, resembling a collection of vignettes or short stories rather than a cohesive novel.

A Long Way From Chicago follows Joey and Mary Alice on their annual summer visits to their grandmother’s rural home while their parents stay behind in Chicago. The first of these weeklong visits is in 1929, on the brink of the Great Depression and eight years before the events of A Year Down Yonder. Joey, who is nine at the beginning of the book, has not seen his grandmother since he was a “tyke” and finds himself both entranced and terrified by her freewheeling, law-flouting, larger-than-life persona.