"A Long Way from Chicago" by Richard Peck

Richard Peck offers a glimpse of Depression era rural Illinois in his masterful episodic “Novel in Stories” that is A Long Way From Chicago.  Peck is the author of more than three dozen novels for young adults. His 1998 Newbery Honor book is ideally suited as a read-aloud for older elementary students.  The stories provide strong characters, humor, and relatable depictions of life told from the perspective of a boy visiting with his younger sister for a week with their grandmother.  It might be an annual trek a long way from the bustling excitement of Chicago but siblings Joey and Mary Alice find small-town domestic adventure in the house alongside the railroad tracks.  Peck depicts the small pleasures of immersing a bare arm in a cool ice bucket on a hot August day as well as the chills and scares of walking home from an outdoor viewing of a Dracula movie.

Grandma Dowdell is a strong quirky woman who is decidedly not the sort of grandma who smothers her visiting grandchildren in hugs as they step off the train.  Instead she’s the kind of woman who is certainly not averse to bending (or breaking) a few rules (or laws).  With her two city grandchildren following behind, Grandma sits up overnight with a corpse, brings them poaching for fish, lies in wait for robbers, and tells many a whopper of a tale looking straight in the eyes of her neighbors.  However, Grandma stands up for her view of justice.  She feeds hungry drifters being escorted out of town, hides a young girl from her abusive mother, and succeeds in restoring a foreclosed home to her “worst enemy.”

As the novel progresses and the children grow from young children to teenagers, Grandma Dowdell also transforms.  In glimpses, we see her soften.  A gift plane ride is wrangled in one story and a tear is wiped away in a later tale.  Slowly a more nuanced portrait emerges of a woman who was first presented as a towering and uncommunicative enigma.  Words of familial love and affection are not depicted in Peck's novel.  Even during the children's last summer visit, protracted grandmotherly squeezes and cuddles are not proffered:  “She came to the depot to see us off on the day we left.  It was to be our last visit together, and I suppose she knew.  But she didn’t say so.”  Commitment and love are shown through Grandma Dowdell’s fierce loyalty and actions.  In the final page of this humorous and ultimately poignant novel, Grandma Dowdell’s love for her grandson blazes with light out into a dark night and my tears flowed. 

Tomorrow, I’m heading straight to the library to get Peck’s sequel: 2001 Newbery Medal winner, A Year Down Yonder.  Years ago both of my children enjoyed and recommended these two novels yet I did not read them.  Perhaps I was too engrossed in my own reading or simply busy with work.  What a lost opportunity to share these wonderful tales in our family.  Time to rectify my omission.  Stay tuned.  I wonder if my now-adult children still remember Grandma Dowdell.  I am unlikely to forget her.  Especially that last image of an old woman waving at a passing train in the wee hours of a wartime morning.