Anastasia Krupnik by Lois LowryYearling, 1993 (Originally Houghton Mifflin, 1979)

I think I read this book as a kid—I certainly owned a copy of one of the later books in the series, and pieces of this one felt familiar—but it wasn’t one of my favorites, and I’m not sure why. Anastasia Krupnik is ten, and hilarious. She’s an only child, living with her English-professor/poet dad and her mom, who’s a painter, but that’s about to change: she’s not at all pleased to learn that she’s going to have a baby brother. She has a notebook in which she keeps many lists, including a list of important things that happen throughout the year (e.g. “I began to have a mercurial temperament” (88)) and a list of things she loves and things she hates, which is charmingly reproduced between chapters—it’s great to see the way the list changes, with things crossed off from one side and added to the other, sometimes multiple times, in a way that captures how strongly kids can feel about things. (And the list is often quite funny: one of the things Anastasia loves is the wart on her thumb, which she finds “very pleasing,” and which “appeared quite by surprise, shortly after her tenth birthday, on a morning when nothing else interesting was happening” (2).)

There are so many funny moments, like when Anastasia gets super-excited that her fourth-grade class will be writing poetry, but then doesn’t pay attention to the assignment and gets an F because her poem is all in lowercase and doesn’t rhyme (it’s wonderfully e.e. cummings-esque). (When she brings the poem home and shows it to her dad, he changes the F to Fabulous.) Or when Anastasia decides she wants to convert to Catholicism because Catholics get to choose an extra name for themselves, but changes her mind once she hears about having to go to confession. (I love that her dad’s reaction to her wanting to become a Catholic is to say “That is both interesting and preposterous,” and then to carry on eating dinner. (32))

But the book isn’t all humor: there’s a tender and sad subplot about Anastasia’s grandmother, who’s 92 and seems to have Alzheimer’s, which totally made me tear up on the subway and then, later, cry outright at my kitchen table.