This is the fifth of Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik novels, and I found it as delightful and funny as the others. The book opens at dinnertime, with Anastasia’s mom being distressed that she forgot to defrost any meat for dinner, again. “I just can’t get my act together when it comes to making dinner,” she says, and then, a bit later, “I am such a hopeless failure at housework” (2, 4). But thirteen-year-old Anastasia and her dad think that they can solve the problem: Anastasia’s mom just needs to be more organized about tasks that need to be done around the house, and for that, she needs a list. Anastasia’s dad gets it started—”Katherine Krupnik’s Housekeeping List”—but Anastasia points out that a) her mom hates lists and b) they’re actually all meant to be sharing housekeeping duties, as a family. And so: the “Krupnik Family Nonsexist Housekeeping Schedule” is born. OK, it says “Krupnik Family,” but most of the tasks are for Anastasia’s mom: she’s an illustrator who works from home, so she’s the one doing stuff around the house and taking care of three-year-old Sam when his morning preschool sessions are over, while Anastasia is at school and Dr. Krupnik’s at work. And the first day with the schedule is laughable: as she points out, there’s no room in it for unexpected events, and there are lots of unexpected events in her average day.
Which is something Anastasia learns for herself, very soon: in the book’s second chapter, on a Friday night, Anastasia’s mom finds out about an unexpected but very well-paying work opportunity that involves a ten-day trip to Los Angeles, leaving on Sunday. She puts Anastasia in charge while she’s gone, and, of course, hilarity ensues, and the housekeeping schedule keeps getting revised as Anastasia and her dad struggle to keep up with the normal tasks of running the household. It’s especially hard once Anastasia starts preparing for her very first date, which entails learning to cook a fancy meal. (Possibly my favorite scene in the whole book is when Anastasia is cooking. It’s extra-hilarious because a guy trying to sell tap-dancing lessons keeps calling the house, and Anastasia keeps telling him to call back because she’s busy/can’t decide. At one point, he calls just as she’s trying to figure out how to open the bottle of wine that the recipe calls for, and he walks her through opening it with a corkscrew, and it’s totally great.)
And oh, man, there are so many other funny moments throughout the whole book, like when Mrs. Krupnik is talking about how her boyfriend in junior high used to snap her bra strap, which she then has to explain to Sam, which then results in Sam saying, “I’m going to snap your bra” to his father (24). Or this, about Anastasia’s goldfish, Frank: “Frank was always wide-awake and cheerful in the mornings. He was the kind of guy who would go jogging at dawn, if he had legs” (45).
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