A Year Down Yonder

Mary Alice goes to stay with her eccentric grandmother who lives in a small town during the Great Depression. She dreads staying in the small town, but comes to love the town and her grandmother so much that she begs to stay. Grandma is the highlight of the story. She seems like a prickly character, never one for hugging, but through the stories Peck tells about her, we grow to learn the softer side of Grandma, a side she doesn’t really like others to see. Grandma and Mary Alice have a whole series of adventures including Halloween pranks with a privy and middle-of-the-night visits to a pecan tree and a cherry pie social with the DAR.

A Year Down Yonder

Because of Sandy's comments on her post, I decided to start at the beginning and read Richard Peck's A Long Way from Chicago, published in 1998 before I read the Newberry winner A Year Down Yonder. I am so glad I did because both books were deliciously funny. Both follow the exploits of Grandama Dowdel through the eyes of her grandchildren Joey and Mary Alice.

The subtitle to A Long Way from Chicago is A novel in stories and that is exactly what you find in the book. Joey and Mary Alice visit small town America each summer for seven years. Each year is covered in a short chapter and details the visit of the two young people. Life in the small town south of Chicago is hysterically navigated by Grandma with the children half delighted and half terrified by what might happen next. These chapters could be read as individual stories. We cataloged this book for Grades 3-7.

Sandy gave a great review of the 2001 Newbery winner A Year Down Yonder. This hilarious book follows Mary Alice as she moves in with Grandma Dowdel for a year. Since Mary Alice is 15, the stories focus on topics appropriate and entertaining to older children. In fact, this book was also awarded an ALA Best Books for Young Adults award.

Both books took me back to my childhood. My sister and I always spent the summers in Tennessee, moving from one grandmother to another. Our favorite place was a very small town in West Tennessee with a population of only 7,000. I knew people Peck wrote about quite intimately. Some of them might have been related. My uncle was a Sheriff's investigator and he knew every story there was to tell, often before they even happened. These summers contain some of my most cherished memories and I will read these books again in a few years just to stir these memories.

While looking at some information about Richard Peck, I ran across this poem written by Richard Peck at the Penguin Group homesite for the author:

Twenty Minutes a Day

Read to your children

Twenty minutes a day;

You have the time,

And so do they.

Read while the laundry is in the machine;

Read while the dinner cooks;

Tuck a child in the crook of your arm

And reach for the library books.

Hide the remote,

Let the computer games cool,

For one day your children will be off to school;

Remedial? Gifted? You have the choice;

Let them hear their first tales

In the sound of your voice.

Read in the morning;

Read over noon;

Read by the light ofGoodnight Moon.

Turn the pages together,

Sitting close as you'll fit,

Till a small voice beside you

says,"Hey, don't quit."

Also, you might notice that my posted by name has changed to Library Cat. I am having to do a project for our regional library consortia which requires a blog and for the life of me I could not figure out how to change the posted by name for just one of my blogs - in fact I don't think it is possible. So for now, this will be Library Cat by Flusianna otherwise known as Flusi!

Flusi

A Year Down Yonder

A Year Down Yonder, by Richard Peck, won the Newbery in 2001. I had never heard of it before browsing the Newbery winners (so thank you again Alicia, for starting this), and that's a shame. I can't wait to introduce this book to my kids. Maybe read it aloud to them.

Anyway, I've been reading a lot of books lately that capture the essence of a place. It's one of the things I enjoy most when I read, but I don't always know how true-to-life depictions of far away places are. A Year Down Yonder struck so close to home for me, though, that I can tell you that Peck captures life in small-town and rural central Illinois perfectly.

The book takes place in 1937, when fifteen year old Mary Alice has to leave her parents (her father lost his job in the Depression, and they lose their Chicago apartment) to stay with her grandmother in downstate Illinois. Like A Gathering of Days, the book chronicles a year in a young girl's life. The language and tone of A Year Down Yonder are completely different from Joan Blos's book, though. Down Yonder is a much lighter-hearted book, with quirky and memorable characters, a few laugh-out-loud scenes, and some pithy country sayings that I haven't heard for years.

I grew up in a small town in northern Illinois (though not as small as the town Grandma Dowdel inhabits), and spent many weekends with my grandmother on a remaining piece of my great-grandmother's family farm. I was surprised how many memories Down Yonder brought back. In many ways, things weren't that different in 1970 than they were in 1937, I guess. My grandmother took me to the local burgoo festival, my other grandmother was a pillar of the local DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution) group, and we hid from tornadoes in the basement several times during my childhood. In fact, the town nearest my great-grandmother's farm was devastated by a tornado a few years ago.

Anyway, each of these scenarios - the burgoo dinner, the class conflict embodied by the local DAR, and a tornado - form the basis for one of the interlinked stories that make up Peck's book. Several descriptive passages also rang true for me - my parents still have a huge snowball bush in their yard like Grandma Dowdel does. I clearly remember (and still often hear from my mother) the speed with which gossip spreads in a small town, and Peck is right on target when Mary Alice notes that "Anybody who thinks small towns are friendlier than big cities lives in a big city." And you should have heard me squeal out loud when Grandma Dowdel pulls out the pink silk pillow with the gold fringe that says "SOUVENIR OF STARVED ROCK". It was like someone I knew actually showed up in the book!

I think I would have loved this book even if it didn't push so many nostalgic buttons for me - Mary Alice and Grandma Dowdel are wonderful characters, and Peck's writing is just plain fun. Down Yonder is like Holes and The Higher Power of Lucky in this - it tackles some serious issues, but it's still very funny. Which I think is sometimes not appreciated as much as it should be.