Long Way From Chicago Peck, Richard

It's the height of the Great Depression, and every summer from 1929 to 1935, Joey and his sister Mary Alice are shipped from Chicago to spend a week with Grandma Dowdel in a sleepy Illinois town. Grandma is a force of nature — a shotgun-toting, pie-baking, gossip-defying tornado who bends the law when it suits her sense of justice. Each summer brings a new escapade: a fishing expedition involving felony quantities of dynamite, a drifter who may or may not be a bank robber, and pranks that leave the whole town reeling. Richard Peck won a Newbery Honor for this warm, laugh-out-loud collection of linked stories. It's nostalgia done right — funny, unsentimental, and full of the kind of grandma you wish you had. Perfect for kids who love mischief, adults who miss good middle-grade fiction, or anyone who needs a reminder that the past was never as tame as we imagine.