Fifteen-year-old Mary Alice has never felt entirely comfortable around her eccentric Grandma Dowdel, and she feels even less comfortable in the small town Grandma Dowdel calls home. But when Mary Alice must spend all of 1937 living there, she finds she can adjust by taking a cue from her hard-working, scrappy grandmother. Each chapter introduces an engaging episode in Mary Alice’s life with her Grandma: she watches Grandma get even with Halloween pranksters, gets the lead role in the Christmas program at school, and helps Grandma begrudgingly host a meeting of the DAR. Peck’s judicious use of hyperbole and exaggeration, both in the narrative and in the dialogue, gives the novel the feeling of an American tall tale, but he doesn't overdo it, so the characters and place feel real in this sequel to A Long Way from Chicago (Dial, 1998). (Age 12 and older)