Anastasia Krupnik

I was reading this blog http://whatireadbackthen.blogspot.com/2010/06/sloop-owner-writing-increasingly.html that I thought was pretty interesting, talking about all these old kids books from the 80s. It's not a secret that I wish I was a kid in the 80s, or even a kid in the 90s for that matter. Being born in 1992 unfortunately doesn't make me a 90s child.

I like reading stuff like this even though I've read about two of the first 20 books she talks about. It made me think though about books from my childhood. That post I linked is about a book called Anastasia at this Address, which I surprisingly never read because I loved (and still love) the Anastasia books. It made me want to talk about the one I liked best, Anastasia Krupnik.



I know this isn't the original cover art, but this is the version I had as a child of the new millenium. It's about a 10 year old girl with glasses who likes to make lists. When I first read this, I was a ten year old with glasses who liked to make lists. Anastasia, however, was much smarter than me, had more interesting thoughts, and made better lists. I thought she was cool.

Anastasia's mother is young and an artist and her father is a poetry teacher who likes classical music. She finds out her mother is pregnant with another child, and Anastasia doesn't like the idea of sharing her position in the family. Anastasia keeps a notebook with pages designated for certain things like words she likes, a list of things she likes and a list of things she hates.

The story is a series of very simple events that Anastasia makes sense of by adding them to her lists. She is assigned to write a poem in school and she writes one in e.e. cummings style and fails the assignment. She decides she wants to convert to Catholicism because she finds out she gets to pick a new middle name. She has a crush on an older boy who she likes until she talks to him. She goes to work with her father and learns things about poems by Wordsworth and what it's like in a college class. She doesn't like visiting her grandmother because she's old, but she learns to appreciate her. Through these simple events and her lists, she learns a lot about life and gains a kind of maturity.

She learns to love her brother, her grandmother, and her own name, among other life lessons she discovers on her own. I love this book because it's so simple but shows a kind of maturity in Anastasia. The simple thoughts of a child are sometimes the most true. I used to read this book late at night in the dark by the the light of my neon mushroom lamp. I still read this book once in a while. It's like comfort food.

Love,
Juliana