A Year Down Yonder

Fifteen year old Mary Alice is sent from Chicago to spend a year with her grandmother in rural Illinois in 1937 and 1938, after her family's Depression era finances make keeping her in the city impractical while her brother Joey is away from home and eventually in the military. Grandma Dowdel is larger than life in exactly the way Mary Alice remembers from an earlier visit chronicled in Peck's previous book, a woman who runs her small town on her own unbothered terms, feuding with a local bully, quietly enforcing a rough justice nobody elected her to hand out, and generally proving far shrewder than the prim, formal grandmother Mary Alice expected.

Peck structures the novel as a loose string of episodes across the school year rather than one driving plot: run ins with local troublemakers, town gossip, small acts of Grandma Dowdel's own eccentric generosity disguised as spite, and a slow developing romance between Mary Alice and a local boy, Royce McNabb, that starts awkward and grows genuine over the year. What looks at first like a comic culture clash between a city girl and her country grandmother gradually reveals real depth underneath Grandma Dowdel's gruff exterior, a woman who has been taking care of her town, and eventually her granddaughter, all along without asking credit for it. The novel jumps forward at its close to show Mary Alice marrying Royce in her grandmother's own front room after the Second World War has ended, the year in Illinois having quietly reshaped the rest of her life.

Peck writes in a warm, conversationally cadenced voice built for reading aloud, broad comedy sitting comfortably next to real tenderness, and the episodic structure makes it an easy book to pick up and put down without losing the thread, though a reader wanting one driving plot rather than a string of connected anecdotes should know that going in.