This is the seventh of nine books in the Anastasia Krupnik series, and I think I’m going to be a little sad when I’ve read them all: they’re such fun middle-grade/early YA reads, and this one, while not my favorite, was still pleasing. Anastasia is thirteen and is bummed that she doesn’t get to go skiing over winter break: it seems like all of her friends are off on ski trips (well, except for Sonya, who is unfortunately stuck going to some weight loss program and being told to eat half an apple for “dessert” – blergh) while Anastasia’s stuck at home. She has nothing to do over break except a school paper on the topic of her “chosen career,” and she’s not really looking forward to it, until she has a brilliant idea: maybe she can convince her parents to let her go to a week-long modeling course for junior high students. In her head, of course, “model” is her chosen career, but she knows her parents aren’t going to be cool with that, so she tells them she wants to be a bookstore owner: the modeling course is just because anyone being entrepreneurial needs poise and confidence, right?
So her parents agree she can take the course, and her dad also arranges for her to interview a Boston bookstore owner he knows: it may not be skiing, but Anastasia’s excited. The modeling school turns out not to be as glamorous as Anastasia’s visions of it, and she keeps forgetting to actually interview the bookstore owner (though she visits her more than once), and oh, also, the hopelessly uncool boy from her old school who totally used to have a crush on her is signed up for the modeling class, too: augh. But it’s OK because visiting a bookstore owner and her store is interesting, and Anastasia makes a new friend in modeling class: Henry Peabody (“Short for Henrietta. But if you call me that, you die”) who is gorgeous (though she doesn’t initially realize it) and also smart/kind/fun. I like Henry’s no-nonsense feminism (she tells Anastasia that when they grow up, they can get married if they want, but they don’t need husbands), but as always, Anastasia herself is what makes this book as fun as it is. I love the way we get to see her rewrites of her school assignment in progress as the week progresses, and I love her ridiculous overactive imagination: she’s always thinking about something, whether she’s pondering changing her name to “Spike” because she thinks the matching k-sounds in “Spike Krupnik” are cool, or worrying about being late (or, possibly worse, early) to modeling school on the first day, or getting bizarrely nervous about Henry’s dad (who’s a police officer) driving her home after she has dinner with the Peabody family (because he’s driving her home on the way to work, and what if he has to, like, capture a criminal with her in the car?). And, I mean, how could I not love/relate to a character who’s described like this?
Bookstores were among Anastasia’s favorite places; maybe they were even first on her list, or at least tied for first with libraries. She sometimes thought that she would like to live in a library, not even having a kitchen—just going out to eat, and spending all the rest of her life surrounded by books. (67-68)
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