'To Grandmother's House We Go!'

Author Richard Peck has written a wonderful series of short stories that combine to form the brilliant novel A Long Way From Chicago. Set during the years of the Great Depression in rural Illinois, young Joey Dowdel takes us on a journey with his sister Mary Alice from Chicago to visit his quite daunting, larger-than-life Grandma.

Each short story describes the events of yet another hot August visit with this grand woman.. a woman you meet for the first time and wonder from what mental institution she has recently escaped. As chapters pass, however, the reader is taken on a fantastically fun ride and learns, without actually realizing it, just what a true 'diamond in the rough' Grandma really is.

I don't know about you, but I remember absolutely loving to visit my grandmother. Granted, she lived in the same town as I did.. but that's not where the fun lies. The bowls of buttered popcorn at bedtime, the soap operas in the afternoon, the endless supply of carbonated beverages, along with the knowledge that you are, in fact, the center of her universe at that moment in time.. these are the things that keep you coming back. Not so for Mary Alice and Joey. They grumble more than once at the prospect of returning to Grandma's for yet another strange hot summer week. You've heard that hindsight is 20/20? For these two, the magic of those visits isn't at all apparent until some years later.

To give you an example of just how Grandma Dowdel is wired, take the title of the first short story chapter for instance: Shotgun Cheatham's Last Night Above Ground, 1929. I don't know about you, but that line reeled me in faster than I knew what hit me! Here is a short excerpt from this first segment, narrated by Joey:

You wouldn't think we'd have to leave Chicago to see a dead body. We were growing up there back in the bad old days of Al Capone and Bugs Moran. Just the winter before, they'd had the St. Valentine's Day Massacre over on North Clark Street. The city had such an evil reputation that the Thompson submachine gun was better known as a "Chicago typewriter."
But I'd grown to the age of nine, and my sister Mary Alice was seven, and we'd yet to see a stiff. We guessed that most of them were where you couldn't see them, at the bottom of Lake Michigan, wearing concrete overshoes.

Not only do the kids finally see their first corpse with Grandma, they trespass, feed the hungry, and even catch the sheriff in his underwear! I'll let your imagination take you from there. I can promise you, though, that this is a very delightful read. The stories move along at a quick pace and each page holds numerous surprises.

This 148 book is written for a 4th-6th grade level, but would be enjoyable to any reader looking for a nostalgic trip down memory lane. If you like this, look for the sequel, A Year Down Yonder, which chronicles Mary Alice's year-long visit with Grandma when she's 15.

Thanks for reading!