A Long Way from Chicago

Author:  Richard Peck

Rating:  ***  (3 stars out of 3 possible, "A")
             Highly Recommended

Audience:  4th Grade and up

Part of the summer our family is reading books with serious themes (see reviews for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and The Watsons Go to Birmingham 1963) and part of the summer we're spending on good, clean fun!

A Long Way from Chicago is set in rural Illinois during the Depression years.  Joey and Mary Alice take the train each summer from Chicago to spend a week with their unconventional Grandmother Dowdel.  Grandma can fix a mean breakfast and a mean gooseberry pie just as easily as she can wield a shotgun, trespass, brew beer at home or blackmail the local banker.  The townspeople are just as colorful and hilarious.  Visits generally find Joe and his sister slack-jawed at what will happen next in the usually sleepy hamlet.

Readers benefit from traveling back in time to a simpler place and a slower pace.  This book is an especially fun read aloud and will introduce your kids to important things like nickel soda pop, the county fair, soap-making, and trapping a crateful of catfish with rotten cheese.  Grandma is a woman of few words and quick country comebacks and Joe and Mary Alice learn to listen closely and not ask too many questions.  Grandma's clever plots and plans reveal themselves in their own timely way, and despite her rough exterior, she can always be counted on to take care of the less fortunate.

A Long Way from Chicago garnered Peck a Newbery Honor; his follow-up book A Year Down Yonder won him the full Newbery.  Additionally, A Season of Gifts features Grandma Dowdel again.  In the humor vein I would also recommend Here Lies the Librarian, The Teacher's Funeral and Fair Weather.

Peck is a well-respected author who has written a variety of books from modern technology plots to war-time historical fiction.  On the other hand, families will need to decide for themselves whether or not they're ready for his supernatural ghost stories.