47 pages • 1 hour read
Richard PeckA Year Down Yonder
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Character Analysis
Mary Alice Dowdel
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of bullying and animal death.
The protagonist and first-person narrator of A Year Down Yonder, Mary Alice begins the novel as a 15-year-old from Chicago who has been sent to live for a year with her grandmother in southern Illinois. Raised in the city, she faces an uneasy adjustment to small-town life, with its lack of urban amenities such as public transportation, movie theaters, department stores, telephones, and modern plumbing. She also dreads the loneliness of the coming year: Though she has spent summers with her grandmother in the past, it was always in the company of her older brother, Joey, who is now working out West with the Civilian Conservation Corps. Additionally, her grandmother is something of a family legend for her inelegant, almost roughneck behavior, and Mary Alice is nervous about living alone with her for a year. Over that year, Mary Alice addresses The Challenges of Feeling Out of Place as she confronts her outsider status. Though many of her classmates exclude her, she does make some friends and does fairly well in school, particularly in English. A local newspaper even gives her a taste of journalism by publishing her brief news items, 
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By Richard Peck
