A Long Way from Chicago Books in Order

The Grandma Dowdel books are Richard Peck at his most funny, sly, and warm. At the center of the series is Mrs. Dowdel, a large, sharp-tongued grandmother in small-town Illinois who scares the neighbors, outsmarts the local bullies, and almost never says exactly what she feels. Around her, Peck builds stories about family, memory, and growing up, but he never forgets to make them entertaining first.

In A Long Way from Chicago, the setup is simple and perfect. Joey and his younger sister Mary Alice leave Chicago each summer to spend a week with Grandma during the years from 1929 to 1935. What looks like a sleepy country visit turns into one wild episode after another, with funerals, love affairs, feuds, ghost stories, and local scandals all passing through Grandma's orbit. The book is told as linked stories, so each visit stands on its own while the children slowly learn who Grandma really is.

Grandma Dowdel runs the place.

A Year Down Yonder takes the same world and deepens it. This time Mary Alice, now fifteen, is sent to live with Grandma for a full year in 1937, when her family can no longer manage in Chicago. That shift matters. The first book has the freedom of summer visits, but the second lets Peck show what daily life with Grandma feels like, especially during the Depression. Mary Alice arrives embarrassed, lonely, and sure she does not belong. Over the year she finds out that Grandma's fierce ways hide real loyalty, and that the town is richer, stranger, and funnier than she first thought.

Then A Season of Gifts returns to the same town from a new angle. Set in 1958, it follows a minister's family who move in next door to Grandma Dowdel. By then she is older, but not softer. Seeing her through neighbors instead of grandchildren gives the series a fresh turn. She still meddles, rescues, schemes, and denies being neighborly while behaving in exactly that way.

Nothing stays sleepy for long.

What ties these books together is not one big cliffhanger plot, but a place and a personality. Peck uses the rhythm of a town year, school terms, holidays, harvests, and local grudges, to build a world where children are always watching adults and learning more than they expected. The stakes are usually social before they are physical. A romance might need saving. A bully may need humbling. A family might need help it would never ask for. Grandma steps into all of it with rough humor and excellent timing.

If you like historical fiction that feels lived in, this series is a great fit. The books have real period detail, but they never read like homework. They are fast, voicey, and full of stories that sound as if somebody is telling them on a porch at dusk, while the smartest person there is pretending not to smile.