A Year Down Yonder

1937, the recession inside the Depression. Mary Alice's parents cannot afford to keep her, so at fifteen she is put on a train out of Chicago down to a small Illinois town to spend the school year with Grandma Dowdel, a woman who explains herself to nobody.

The book is episodic, a chapter to each season and occasion, and every chapter is Grandma running an operation with a completely straight face. She defends the privy against Halloween pranksters with wire, a railroad spike and a bucket of glue. She gets money out of the town's tightest people, deals with the girl bullying Mary Alice at school, faces down the DAR ladies, stages a Christmas do on her own terms, and arranges a romance between the schoolteacher and a WPA artist without either of them noticing they are being arranged. Mary Alice narrates it as it happens and works out only afterwards what the old woman was doing and, more to the point, who it was for. Royce McNabb turns up partway through the year.

It is a sequel, it won the Newbery in 2001, and it runs the same machine as A Long Way from Chicago with Grandma unchanged. The affection under the granite arrives about when expected, and the episodes are engineered for the laugh rather than for accumulation, so the year has less shape than its parts. Read aloud it is close to perfect, because the timing is built for a voice. An epilogue marries Mary Alice to Royce years later.