![]() ![]() It turns out it was a cat that caused the curtain over the coffin to move. Shortly, the coffin begins to move and Grandma shoots it with a shotgun. Effie Wilcox, Grandma’s nemesis, is in attendance as well. Grandma lies to a reporter about Shotgun, saying he was a war hero. Shotgun Cheatham has just died and Grandma Dowdel conducts an open house for him. This is the first summer Joey and Mary Alice go to stay with their grandmother unaccompanied. ![]() The opening segment, “Shotgun Cheatham’s Last Night Above Ground – 1929,” was first published in a collection titled Twelve Shots: Stories About Guns in 1997. The tale then unfolds in a series of short stories, or vignettes, eight in total, that cover summers from 1929 to 1935 and an additional story for 1942. They find out that they will be visiting their grandmother, “Grandma Dowdel,” for a week in August every year. ![]() At the beginning of the book, Joey is nine years old and his sister, Mary Alice, is seven. An old man looks back at the annual trips he made to his grandmother’s house in a rural part of Illinois during the depression era from his home in the Chicago of Al Capone and Bugs Moran. ![]() A Long Way from Chicago tells of the small town life. This 1999 Newbery Honor award-winning work was followed by a sequel, A Year Down Yonder, an award winner as well with a Newbery Medal for children’s literature two years later. Richard Peck’s A Long Way from Chicago is a short story cycle that makes up a novel. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |