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. A Year Down Under opens on the heels of the economic downturn of 1937 and follows Mary Alice as she visits her grandmother for a whole year, all on her own, and discovers in Grandma one of the best friends she’s ever had. Like its predecessor, the story mixes slapstick farce and period detail and centers the unconventional Grandma Dowdel.

A Season of Gifts, the third and final book in the series, jumps forward two decades to the late 1950s and concludes around Christmastime. Unlike the previous two novels, Mary Alice and Joey do not appear in the story. Instead, it is narrated by Bobby Barnhart, the 12-year-old son of a minister who has just moved in next door to Grandma Dowdel. Like Joey and Mary Alice before him, Bobby soon overcomes his initial wariness of his colorful neighbor to sense the warm generous heart she hides behind her bluster.

This series of novels is characteristic of the work of Peck, a prolific author who wrote on a wide range of subjects, mostly for young readers, penning popular classics like Fair Weather (1978), The River Between Us (2003), and The Teacher’s Funeral (2004). His young adult novels often tackle challenging issues like prejudice and death, while also venturing into comedy, history, and coming-of-age stories. He credits his career as an English teacher in high and middle schools for inspiring much of his work. For his Grandma Dowdel books, he mined his memories of growing up in midcentury Illinois, as well as collecting stories from his elders.