A Long Way from Chicago

A Long Way from Chicago is a novel in stories by the American writer Richard Peck, published in 1998 by Dial Books for Young Readers. Joey Dowdel tells it, looking back on seven summer visits that he and his sister Mary Alice made to their grandmother's house in southern Illinois, beginning in August 1929.

Grandma Dowdel is the centre of the book. In the first summer a reporter comes to town asking about a dead man the town called Shotgun Cheatham, and Grandma feeds him a story of her own invention while the coffin sits in her parlour. The following year she catches the local boys who have been blowing up mailboxes and privies, then lets their father know what she could tell the town about a mouse in his milk. She fishes the town lake with illegal traps to feed men riding the rails, borrows the sheriff's boat to do it, and takes her gooseberry pie into a fairground contest against a rival baker.

Peck sets one episode in each summer of the Depression, so the children notice hunger and hard times alongside their grandmother's schemes. Joey begins the visits as a city boy who would rather be anywhere else and ends them with a different sense of where he comes from.