Anastasia Krupnik

Ten-year-old fourth grader Anastasia loves making lists; her "things I love" and "things I hate" lists are repeated throughout, with cross-outs and additions each time. The two bigger events that happen in the book come later: her 92-year-old grandmother's death, and the birth of her baby brother, who Anastasia gets to name. At first, she's so displeased about the baby that she finds the worst name she can think of for him, but by the time he's born, she ends up making a perfect choice.

Read this many many times as a kid, it was wonderful to revisit as an adult, as an audiobook, with my 8yo (although I forgot about the "crock of shit" line. Oh well!). It's also where I learned the word "mercurial" and first heard of Wordsworth's poem "i show more wandered lonely as a cloud."

See also: Clementine and the Family Meeting / Completely Clementine by Sara Pennypacker show less

Falling in love for the first time. A new baby brother on the way. Beginning to understand her forgetful, elderly grandmother. There's plenty of new stuff going on for a ten-year-old named Anastasia Krupnik by author Lois Lowry.

Well! Anastasia's pretty liberal about identifying everything she doesn't like, so I don't feel bad starting out with cons for this middle grade read from the 1970s.

Anastasia is smart in an academic and bookish way, but she also has quite a smart mouth at times, just downright disrespectful. Her writer-artist-type parents tend not to make a thing of it, and with an especially quirky father who's okay with cussing in front of his daughter (yes, the story includes an actual "would've been bleeped out on network TV" show more cuss word—twice) and letting his daughter sip his wine and slurp the foam from his beers, going with the flow of his child's smart mouth is understandable for his character.

Also, maybe I grew up with kids who grew up pretty fast, but even with Anastasia's smarts, some of her experiences seem littler-kiddish to me. This isn't the only middle grade book that's given me that impression lately, but it isn't something I noticed the first time I read this story. Granted, I think I was only eight or nine then.

So, I almost feel guilty that I enjoyed the book more this time than I did as a kid. (Grownup nostalgia, partly?) It's a funny read in a dry and offhand kind of way, and it's also got some truly poignant moments. Anastasia becomes more likable late in the story, and the ending is wonderful.

Good thing, when my younger self read the book, it didn't make me think I could get away with being a smart aleck, and I didn't repeat the story's cuss word to anybody. My adult self plans to visit or revisit more books in this series. show less

It's weird, I didn't really think of these books as that funny when I was a kid. Anastasia reminds me a lot of myself at that age, so I probably just thought it seemed normal.

But now! I was reading this at lunch and I had to stop because I kept laughing and my co-workers were staring at me.

For example:
"Anastasia had a small pink wart in the middle of her left thumb. She found her wart very pleasing. It had appeared quite by surprise, shortly after her tenth birthday, on a morning when nothing else interesting was happening, and it was the first wart she had ever had, or seen.

"It's the loveliest color I've seen in a wart," her mother, who had seen others, said with admiration.

"Warts, you know," her father had told her, "have a kind of show more magic to them. they come and go without any reason at all, rather like elves."

I love her parents (and how terrifying is it that her mother and I are now the same age?). They are hilarious and awesome.

Oh yeah, and then you might cry at the end part. show less

This book series, particularly the first two, have been hanging around the back of my mind for a few years now because I had forgotten sooooo many of the details and couldn't remember enough to recall what the series was. But now they've been found again, and I HAD to start rereading them! There is definitely some outdated stuff, and it's not as if the book is some kind of literary masterpiece, but I totally enjoyed getting to visit the story and Anastasia's mind again! She is snarky, funny, and was immensely relatable to young me, and for that alone I loved this.

To Anastasia Krupnik, being ten is very confusing. For one thing, she has this awful teacher who can't understand why Anastasia doesn't capitalize or punctuate her poems. Then, there's Washburn Cummings, a very interesting sixth-grade boy who doesn't even know she is alive. Even her parents have become difficult. They insist she visit her 92-year-old grandmother who can never remember Anastasia's name. On top of that, they're going to have a baby -- at their age! It's enough to make a kid want to do something terrible. Anastasia knows that if she didn't have her secret green notebook to write in, she would never make it to her eleventh birthday.

Anastasia Krupnik is an only child, her mother an artist, and her father a college professor. She is bright and precocious. She keeps an ever changing list of things she likes and things she does not like. Among her various issues: a teacher who doesn't like her poetry because it doesn't rhyme; a roudy black boy in her school who she has a crush on; her grandmother, who can't remember who Anastasia is; and most of all, a baby brother on the way.
Anastasia is smart and sweet enough to be likable, but she has the realistic problems that ten-year-olds have... she can be impatient, pig-headed, selfish, and impolite as well. Her parents are nicely developed characters themselves, too. (Many YA novels portray parents that are rather show more one-dimensional.) It was laugh out loud funny at times, and occasionally I shed a few tears as well.
Hope the others in the series are as good as this one. show less

I know that I've read this at least once before, but I didn't remember it. And yet somehow I know that I got more out of it this time than I did thing. Weird. Anyway, good book for the right audience. Especially kids who can sympathize with the girl, and not see her, as I do through a mother's eyes, as awfully spoiled and self-centered. Inflicting a baby brother on her is probably a good idea. I should consider reading more in the series.