Ratings

Content Ratings based on a 0-5 scale where
0 = no objectionable content and
5 = an excessive or disturbing level of content

Guide to Rating System

LANGUAGE

VIOLENCE

SEXUAL CONTENT

ADULT THEMES

2001 Newbery Medal Winner

Ratings Explanation

Violence:  Some mild pranks around Halloween have the town boys turning over people’s “privies” (outhouses); Grandma sets her own trap for the boys and they get banged up a little.  Grandma traps and kills foxes; she fires a gun and shoots one in the head to put it out of its misery.

Sexual Content:  There is none in this book, however one scene might be worth mentioning–Grandma rents a room in her house to an artist, and one day he attempts to paint a woman in the nude (unbeknownst to Grandma).  When a snake in the attic falls on her from the rafters, she runs out of the house wearing nothing but the snake and streaks through town “as nature intended.”

Adult Themes:  Grandma isn’t exactly forthright in her tactics for getting things; she “borrows” pumpkins and pecans from neighbors’ yards.  It is alluded to that one girl in high school has a baby (presumably out of wedlock) and that a lightning rod salesman traveling through town was responsible for certain peculiar traits in that family’s gene pool.

Synopsis

It is Chicago in 1937, and 15-year-old Mary Alice Dowdel is being sent to live with her grandmother for a year out in the boondocks, a situation which she’s not too thrilled about.  Grandma is a no-nonsense, no frills kind of lady, and takes up an entire doorframe with her figure.  She complains that Mary Alice’s cat, Bootsie, is nothing but another mouth to feed, and in these times (the Depression is supposed to be over, but it doesn’t feel like it), everything is hard to come by.  So Mary Alice must grit her teeth and suffer life with Grandma, the woman everyone in town seems afraid of.  But before the year is up, she sees another side to her Grandma: the resourceful side, who makes the best pecan and pumpkin pies in the county; the tender side, who scrapes her change up for a lovely pair of new shoes for Mary Alice; and the savvy side, who knows a thing or two about helping Mary Alice hook the cute new boy in town, Royce McNabb, before he gets stolen by Carleen Lovejoy.  And there are plenty more sides to Grandma, too:  trigger-happy, tough, generous, and hilarious (when Mary Alice asks her how old one woman is, Grandma replies, “Don’t know. You’d have to cut off her head and count the rings in her neck.”)  Mary Alice sees them all, and wonders, when the year is up, if she really wants to return to Chicago after all.

This is one of the funniest, best-written books I’ve read in a while.  It’s written as the sequel to Mr. Peck’s A Long Way From Chicago, the first book in which Mary Alice and her brother spend time getting to know Grandma Dowdel in small town, midwestern America.  However, A Year Down Yonder is perfectly delightful as a stand alone read and will have you wishing you, too, had a feisty grandma like her.  And craving pecan pie. . .yum.