From the Book Jacket:
The 1999 Newbery Honor What happens when
Joey and his sister, Mary Alice-two city slickers from Chicago-make their annual summer visits to Grandma Dowdel's seemingly sleepy Illinois town?
August 1929: They see their first corpse, and he isn't resting easy.
August 1930: The Cowgillboys terrorize the town, and Grandma fights back with a dead mouse and a bottle of milk.
August 1931 : Joey and Mary Alice help Grandma to trespass, pinch property, poach, catch the sheriff in his underwear, and feed the hungry-all in one day.
And there's more-much more-as Joey and Mary Alice make seven summer trips to Grandma's, each one funnier and more surprising than the year before. In the grand storytelling tradition of American humorists from Mark Twain to Flannery O'Connor, Richard Peck has created a memorable world filled with characters who, like Grandma herself, are larger than life and twice as entertaining. And year round, you are sure to enjoy your stay with them.
Richard Peck
created Grandma Dowdel in a short story called "Shotgun Cheatham's Last Night Above Ground," which became the first chapter of this book. He says, "Grandma is too sizable to be confined in a single story, too sizable and mystifying to her growing grandchildren, who in each visit discover in her a different woman."
Mr. Peck is the author of over twenty highly praised novels for young readers. His Dial titles are Strays Like Us; TheGreat Interactive Dream Machine, named to Voice of Youth Advocates' list of BestScience Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror for1996; and Lost in Cyberspace, which wasnominated for three state awards. His other books include Ghosts I Have Been, an ALA Best of the Best Books for Young Adults, and Father Figure, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults.
Richard Peck is also a two-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for best juvenile mystery. He has received several awards for the body of his work, including the 1997 Empire State Award, given by the New York Library Association. He spent the first eighteen years of his life in Decatur, Illinois, "a middle-American town in a time when teenagers were considered guilty until proven innocent." He lives in New York City.
