Mildred has to walk several miles without shoes in order to get home instead of bullying Mary Alice. However, Grandma Dowdel simply invites Mildred in and then takes the girl’s shoes and puts them on her horse, which she then sets loose. This turns out to be good advice as Mildred quickly starts picking on Mary Alice and, assuming that she is a spoiled city girl, follows her home on horseback to demand a dollar from Grandma Dowdel. When she takes Mary Alice to her new school, she advises her granddaughter to avoid her classmate Mildred Burdick as her family is known to be bad news. Grandma Dowdel greets Mary Alice by complaining that her radio will be noisy and her cat will need feeding. However, her family are struggling during the Great Depression and cannot currently afford to look after her. She is not looking forward to living in what she assumes will be an isolated, backward, country settlement. It begins in 1937, with the protagonist and narrator, fifteen-year-old Mary Alice, taking a train from Chicago to an unnamed rural town to live with her grandmother. A sequel to Richard Peck’s A Long Way from Chicago, A Year Down Yonder explores assumptions, rough justice, and growing up through the continuing adventures of Mary Alice and the Dowdel family.
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