A Long Way from Chicago, by Richard Peck, has three main characters Joey\Joe, Mary Alice, and the worst influence ever, their grandma. She can tell some really good whoppers and one of those whoppers is putting a cat in a coffin so it would move the gause and the lid of the coffin to make it seem like the person inside was alive. So she shot the coffin to make it look like she was keeping him dead which made the guests jump out of the window in shock. The reason why she did this is she wanted the people out of her house but she didn’t want to say it to their face and that happened. In this book you’ll find out many more things about these characters and what happens. Before i'm finished I'm gonna tell ya a bit more about the other two main characters. Mary Alice gets caught in the middle of things. Which is trying to hide a girl from her very demanding mother. The girl she was protecting was also wanting to date a certain guy but will she succeed in doing so find out by reading the novel. Now moving on to Joe/Joey. Joey is pretty much the author and you only get to see his point of view but other than that he is very helpful in the story. Like the time these kids came in to steal grandma's shotgun. He went to go get the kids parents to punish them, but that was grandma’s idea. That was a very not short summary of the book. I will be telling you my opinion of A Long Way from Chicago. In my opinion I think it is a very good book because many of the parts can be funny and story developed which is theory worthy. Furthermore the characters in the book are very creative with interesting backstories that haven’t been fully revealed which makes you keep thinking of the book. One last thing why I like the book is the setting. The old timey country feeling is pretty cool when put into a book. I would give this book a 4.8/5. It has some flaws like it didn’t explain the characters enough so we have to theorise more than we have to. Plus I thought the bum thing was weird. Besides that everything else was good. In conclusion the book is up there in my favorites and I would recommend it to you for you to read. Some random quotes from the book are “Justice” “Was it legal?” “Aha” “I’m dead” and “I don't think grandma is a very good influence on us”