42 pages • 1 hour read
Richard PeckFair Weather
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1978A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “An Invitation from Aunt Euterpe”
The story opens on a summer day in 1893 in rural Christian County, Illinois. Rosie Beckett, nearly 14, is ignoring the teasing of her little brother, seven-year-old Buster. She knows Buster is testing her, wondering if she is “fixing to grow up and leave him behind” (4). She passes Buster’s test as he skins a squirrel in front of her, and they discuss their older sister, Lottie. At 17, Lottie is being courted by a local hired man, Everett, whom their mother dislikes because they know nothing about him. Buster offers Rosie hollyhock blossoms and buds to make hollyhock dolls, but Rosie refuses them as she is too old to make the dolls now. She is freckled, red-haired, and “a little bit spunky” (7) and wonders if anyone would ever want to marry her.
Granddad Fuller returns from his daily trip to town in his horse and buggy. He bears a letter from the children’s aunt, Aunt Euterpe Fuller Fleischacker, who lives in Chicago and of whom they know and hear very little.
Chapter 2 Summary: “The Curve of the Earth”
That evening, the family sits down to dinner: Dad, a 40-year-old farmer; Mama, who at 38 already has a white streak in her hair; Granddad, Buster, Lottie, and Rosie. Mama reads her sister’s letter aloud. Euterpe tells about the World’s Columbian Exposition, the fair to honor the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of America. It is the “wonder of the age” (13) and will make the world take note of Chicago’s accomplishments.
Euterpe then invites Mama and the children to visit for a week and see the fair. She condescendingly adds that the children will have “seen nothing of the world” (13) since their vision is limited to the walls of their one-room schoolhouse. Mama rolls her eyes at this, since she and Euterpe attended the same school. Aunt Euterpe offers to put Mama and the children up and pay their admission. She encloses four train tickets and specifically excludes Granddad. In closing she offers to meet the train and says she will be in black mourning clothes, her husband having died four years before.
The children are excited. They have never been on a train. Mama asks her husband what he thinks about the offer, considering that Chicago has a million or so people, “most of them criminals” (16). Lottie points out that Aunt Euterpe sounds 100 years old, although Mama replies that her sister is only 44. Granddad, whose feelings have been hurt, croaks that Euterpe was “born old” and married an “old geezer” because he was the only one who would have her. But he tells the children all about the fair’s Ferris wheel and the hot air balloon that reaches so high, one can see “the curve of the earth” (18).
Mama hesitates about accepting the offer. In bed that night, the sisters wonder if Mama will accept Aunt Euterpe’s invitation. Lottie thinks their mother is too afraid of the big city to go to Chicago. Rosie thinks Mama wants to get Lottie away from Everett. She wonders aloud why Euterpe invited them in the first place.
Chapter 3 Summary: “Christmas in July”
The next morning, Mama sends Granddad off to help with the butter-making, a chore that usually belongs to Rosie and Lottie. She urges Rosie to find as many eggs to sell as possible and then orders Rosie and Buster to pick blackberries after breakfast. Mama then announces to Granddad that he needs to take her and the children to town that day in their wagon. Granddad protests, not wanting to overwork his precious horse, which is named for the actress Lillian Russell. Mama wins, and they head off down the road with “all the world we knew fanned out around us” (30). Granddad’s dog, Tip, rides along.
Mama gives Granddad a letter to mail and then takes the girls to the grocery store, where Mama drives a hard bargain for the eggs, butter, and berries. At the dry goods store, Mama points to a dressmaker’s dummy in a fancy skirt and shirtwaist and asks if this would be a suitable outfit for the fair. Not the state fair, she emphasizes, but the “Columbian Exposition at Chicago” (35). Rosie realizes they are really going to the world’s fair, and that she will get to wear long skirts for the first time. Buster gets knickerbocker britches, a jacket, a collar, a sailor hat, and new high-top shoes. The girls point out that Mama hasn’t bought anything for herself, and she shrugs off the comment.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
After initially setting the domestic scene, the focus of these opening chapters is on the proposed journey to Chicago. The family’s journey to the local town is an early parallel to this, which creates anticipation and also establishes the first half of a juxtaposition between Country Ways Versus City Ways. Richard Peck has said that all his novels are about journeys, and this is immediately apparent of Fair Weather (Peck, Richard. Anonymously Yours. Messner/Simon & Schuster, 1991). His two previous novels also focus on journeys set in his home state of Illinois: In A Long Way From Chicago and A Year Down Yonder, characters travel from Chicago to rural Illinois and experience a dramatic transformation under the tutelage of an elderly relative. Peck reverses this journey in Fair Weather, sending rural characters to the city for an eye-opening experience.
In all three of these novels, Peck sends his young characters away from their parents, part of his work’s exploration of the young-adult need to develop self-reliance. As a result, these early chapters are the only ones in which the plain-spoken Beckett parents directly feature: Mama will make only a brief appearance in Chapter 4. These chapters therefore create essential context for the novel but are quite different from the rest of the narrative. The Beckett parents and rural domesticity support the book’s thematic contrast between Country Ways Versus City Ways. Mama can be strict, but she is kind. Dad has a dry sense of humor and a deep respect for, and understanding of, his wife. They have none of the pretension of Aunt Euterpe, which can be seen in her letter to the family. The characters’ diction also reflects this divide: The country expressions used by the Becketts are a motif in support of the theme and, again, offer a contrast to Euterpe’s pompous language. The children and Granddad often use rural metaphors such as “a squirrel skins easy” (3) and “Mama’s getting crankier than the handle on a churn” (23).
The novel’s major dramatic question is established during Chapter 2: If the family goes to the World’s Fair, how will the experience change each of them? This question will play out in the context of one of the story’s major themes: The Advantages of Family Love and Friendship Compared With Wealth Alone. At this early stage, the development of this theme is foreshadowed by the children’s anticipation and conjecture about the impact on themselves and, especially, each other, showing their well-developed emotional bonds. Peck also sets the stage for the novel’s pacing in these preliminary chapters, as the action moves quickly toward the impending journey and week-long visit. This fast pace will continue through the novel, as the Chicago narrative unfolds in a “real-time” framing of 7 days. This finite set-up of time gives the novel a sense of urgency and excitement.
The first chapters set up the importance of education and experience, a key focus of young adult novels. At this stage, this is framed as a lack of opportunity in a rural community, perhaps especially for girls: At 14, Rosie will leave school while, at 17, Lottie is focused on her marriage chances. Thus, the first section sets up the theme of Female Power and Social Structures in the 1890s. The novel shows that Lottie and Rosie are indifferent about education as the story opens. Lottie has had all the schooling she wants to, while Rosie says she has one more year of high school to go as if the typical rural two-year high school education is all she will ever need. Through the character of Mama, the book communicates that the children are “in dire need of all the education [they] could get” (18). The young characters’ understanding of this fact will change as they experience everything the fair has to offer, driven by the fair as a symbol of progress and education in the novel.
This opening section immediately establishes Rosie as the protagonist and first-person narrator. She also narrates in the past tense, from a point in time distant from the events themselves, evident from the novel’s first line: “It was the last day of our old lives, and we didn’t know it” (1). Rosie provides frequent reminders that she is looking back on past events in expressions such as “I still see the sunset slanting through the corn rows” (10) and “I picture us yet” (30). These reminders show that she has had some time—years, as she will state in a later chapter—to consider and assess their significance. This indicates that the events—in the past for her but in the future for the reader—will be of lifechanging significance, raising the narrative stakes. Rosie’s retrospective view allows the narrator to have an awareness of her own and others’ character development, both hinting and concealing this knowledge for the reader. This structure permits Rosie to provide foreshadowing, as when she predicts Buster’s future in Chapter 1: He can never stay in one place for long and will never be a farmer. In this way the narrative voice has a level of omniscience, creating a sense of inevitability about the narrative as it progresses into the next part.
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