A Year Down Yonder

"There wasn't much more than a nickel in her purse, and a sandwich for the train in mine"

A Year Down Yonder
By: Richard Peck
Copyright 2000
Puffin Books
Fiction
4th or 5th grade
130 Pages

Mary Alice has been sent down to live with her grandma while things are not going well with her family.  Because of the war going on they along with everyone else in the US have lost just about everything.  So her parents send her down south to live with grandma for about a year while the family can get their feet planted back on the ground.  This Chicago girl is far from home trying to adjust to how Grandma Dowdel does everything.  For one, her cat can't even stay in the house, so the city cat over time tansfroms into a contry cat, even has a little kitten of her own durring the book.  The things that Mary Alice learns from her grandma are lessons she will never forget.  After a long time of just wanting to go home and back to how things used to be she finds good friends, love, and a side of Grandma that she never knew.  When the time came to going home, she wanted to stay, She wanted to take care of Grandma, she wanted to make sure she was alright.  It goes to show, never judge a book by its cover, because no matter how mean someone is on the outside, there could be so much niceness hidden inside.  Grandma was not all that bad: she cheated people out of money so someone else could be able to get by for the next year.  She took in a boarder, but charged him a lot, she later introduced him to the woman he married (because she was better then the other that had her eye on him).  She even saved the cat and kitten when the tornado hit, those cats that shed, she brought into her house and protected them.  Mary Alice would never forget that year, and would get married in her grandma's house to her soldier, who she wrote, who she met durring her time at Grandma's house. 

I would recomend this book, well I dont really want to, I did not really like it.  It was interesting and funny, so maybe it would be good for older elementary school kids.

I got kind of lost durring the book, more so near the end when it seemed to be jummping around without much reason and connection to things.

I liked the message the story had, but I did not really enjoy the book, it never hoocked me in and it was one of those that I really had to sit down and force myself to read.  Is it bad that I feel bad for thinking that?