{"id":698,"date":"2006-02-11T12:24:50","date_gmt":"2006-02-11T17:24:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/?p=698"},"modified":"2006-03-09T20:15:14","modified_gmt":"2006-03-10T01:15:14","slug":"a-year-down-yonder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/2006\/02\/11\/a-year-down-yonder\/","title":{"rendered":"A Year Down Yonder"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>2001 Newbery Medal Winner: A Year Down Yonder, by Richard Peck<\/p>\n<pracut name=\"You_know_the_drill\">\n<b>The Plot<\/b><br \/>\nDuring the Depression, a teenage girl from Chicago is sent to live with her grandmother in the middle of nowhere.   She spends a year there in the very small town, getting to know her grandmother and the people who live around her.<\/p>\n<p><b>My Thoughts<\/b><br \/>\nIn the grand tradition of Anne of Green Gables, Cheaper by the Dozen, and the first few Little House books, A Year Down Yonder is a series of incidents strung together: a biography rather than a novel with a beginning, middle and end to the plot.  The various incidents are a bit more interconnected than in some of my examples, but the essential flow is the passage of time rather than the passage of events.<\/p>\n<p>But since I happen to be a fan of that sort of book (no point shoehorning a bad plot into what&#8217;s not a plot-y book), I have no objections to it.    What makes or breaks this sort of book are the characters: if they&#8217;re interesting, then it works. If they&#8217;re dull, then no one cares about their lives and the whole thing falls flat.  The main character&#8217;s grandmother is the person who dominates most of the incidents; it&#8217;s her presence that either causes them to happen or makes them unusual enough to be worth retelling.   And she is unique enough that I enjoyed seeing what throwing her into the mix would do.<\/p>\n<p>Unfortunately, I found most of the rest of the town&#8217;s denizens to be one dimensional and poorly developed.  Only a few got a significant amount of page time, and they were mainly confined to behaving in the same way each time they appeared.   There was no development on their parts over the course of the year.\n<\/pracut>\n<p><b>In Short<\/b><br \/>\nOverall, while I did enjoy the book (possibly enough to pick up the book it&#8217;s sequel to, but not right away), I can&#8217;t say I found it really <i>special<\/i> in any way.  I give it a 7\/10 for sheer inoffensiveness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>2001 Newbery Medal Winner: A Year Down Yonder, by Richard Peck The Plot During the Depression, a teenage girl from Chicago is sent to live with her grandmother in the middle of nowhere. She spends a year there in the very small town, getting to know her grandmother and the people who live around her. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/flaminggeeks.com\/k\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}