When she catches them in the act, she dispatches Joey to fetch their parents. She lies in wait that evening with the lights off waiting for them to try to steal something from her. She knows that they will use the opportunity for some sort of mischief.

Grandma sets the boys up for a fall by letting them know that she will not be at home for her next milk delivery from their father’s business. They blow up Grandma’s mailbox and Effie Wilcox’s outhouse. The next summer, recounted in “The Mouse in the Milk – 1930,” finds boys from the Cowgill family terrorizing the town. At this point in the novel, it becomes abundantly clear that Grandma Dowdel knows how to lie and manipulate to get the best of people who cross her path. It turns out it was a cat that caused the curtain over the coffin to move. Shortly, the coffin begins to move and Grandma shoots it with a shotgun. Effie Wilcox, Grandma’s nemesis, is in attendance as well.

Grandma lies to a reporter about Shotgun, saying he was a war hero. Shotgun Cheatham has just died and Grandma Dowdel conducts an open house for him. This is the first summer Joey and Mary Alice go to stay with their grandmother unaccompanied. The opening segment, “Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground – 1929,” was first published in a collection titled Twelve Shots: Stories About Guns in 1997. The tale then unfolds in a series of short stories, or vignettes, eight in total, that cover summers from 1929 to 1935 and an additional story for 1942. They find out that they will be visiting their grandmother, “Grandma Dowdel,” for a week in August every year. At the beginning of the book, Joey is nine years old and his sister, Mary Alice, is seven. An old man looks back at the annual trips he made to his grandmother’s house in a rural part of Illinois during the depression era from his home in the Chicago of Al Capone and Bugs Moran. A Long Way from Chicago tells of the small town life. This 1999 Newbery Honor award-winning work was followed by a sequel, A Year Down Yonder, an award winner as well with a Newbery Medal for children’s literature two years later. Richard Peck’s A Long Way from Chicago is a short story cycle that makes up a novel.

A Long Way from Chicago by Richard Peck