Peck revisits Illinois in ‘Yonder’ Sequel set during Depression sparkles

A YEAR DOWN YONDER by Richard Peck, Dial Books for Young Readers, New York, 130 pages, 2000, $16.99.

My son James and I were driving home from basketball practice a while back when this year’s John Newbery Medal winner for young adult fiction was announced on National Public Radio: Richard Peck’s “A Year Down Yonder.” A cheer erupted in the car for we had just read and loved this sequel to “A Long Way From Chicago,” a favorite from last year (and itself a Newbery Honor Book and National Book Award finalist).

Sequels can be dreadful things, as Hollywood has so often and so thoroughly proven, but from time to time they can be just as good, if not better, than the original. Such is the case with Peck’s latest, which returns us to rural Illinois, now in the depths of the Depression.

The year is 1937. Amelia Earhart has disappeared into the sky and 10 million men are out of work. Due to financial setbacks, Mary Alice Dowdel, 15, has been packed off by her parents to her grandma’s home for a year. Her brother Joey, who had a large role in the previous book, goes to work for the Civilian Conservation Corps out West, and so makes only a couple of cameo appearances.

“Novels,” Peck has written, “are never about people living easy lives through tranquil times; novels are the biographies of survivors.” Grandma Dowdel is a model of the surviving kind, able to live off the land and her wits no matter how dire the situation. She is cunning and trigger-happy, aware of laws, but more than ready to break them if need be.

Grandma Dowdel is also a formidable teller of tall tales and a keeper of country customs. In order to make Alice’s city cat Bootsie stay put, she rubs butter on her paws. “That’s what you do with a cat in a new place,” she explains. “By the time they’ve licked off all that butter, they’re right at home. Works every time.” At another point, when Alice complains about the cold, Grandma states with typical exaggeration, “When I was a girl, we had to walk in our sleep to keep from freezing to death.”

Alice is marched straight off to school from the train station. Coming from Chicago, the teen-ager is taken aback by the ramshackle building with its privies and crumbling front steps. Typecast as a rich city girl by her classmates, she must struggle to fit into small-town society. Grandma helps her to understand and, in some cases, overcome local prejudices to the point that the girl begins to think like her grandmother. She even begins to come out with Grandma-like sayings as when she describes a classmate as being “skinnier than a toothpick with termites.”

The plot revolves around the major holidays in the small town, including Halloween, Armistice Day, Christmas, Valentine’s Day and Washington’s Birthday. The Halloween chapter is especially fun, as Grandma thwarts local mischief-makers who have been destroying outhouses around town. One boy, August Fluke Jr., comes up on the wrong end of a pan of homemade glue.

Toward the end, Grandma takes in a boarder, Arnold Green, an artist from New York who is working for the Works Progress Administration or WPA. In highlighting the benefits of living in this part of the state, Grandma tells the stranger, “It’s the healthiest spot in Illinois. We had to hang a man to start the graveyard.” She eventually sets him up with the local schoolteacher, Miss Butler. And a romance blooms between Alice and a new young man in town, Royce McNabb. The book ends with a tornado and nuptials, but I won’t say what is destroyed or who ties the knot.

Now a New Yorker, Peck was born in Decatur, Ill., “in a time when teen-agers were considered guilty until proven innocent.” He went to college in Indiana and England, and was a soldier in Germany, serving as a chaplain’s assistant in Stuttgart. He later taught English. He credits teaching with making a writer of him: “I found my future readers right there in the roll book.”

Societal issues have inspired a number of Peck’s 25-plus books. “Father Figure,” for example, arose from the realization that hardly more than half of his readers lived in the same homes as their fathers. “Are You in the House Alone?” which continues to stir controversy, grew out of the knowledge that “the typical victim of our fastest growing, least-reported crime, rape, is a teen-ager.” Peck has also written humor books, such as “Lost in Cyberspace” and its sequel “The Great Interactive Dream Machine.” By the way, Richard Peck is not to be confused with Robert Peck, another fine author of young adult fiction, including “The Day No Pigs Would Die and Soup.”

While my son preferred “A Long Way from Chicago,” primarily because Alice’s brother Joey had a starring role, he doesn’t hesitate to recommend its sequel. As do I, a devoted member of the Grandma Dowdel fan club.