Mostly, her problems seem to resolve themselves with time-the incremental process of growing up. Nothing enormously transformative ever really happens to Anastasia. She wants her father not to keep his manuscripts in progress in the refrigerator (in case the house burns down). She wants her mother to wear makeup and host luncheons. (Should blame him for my MFA in poetry?) And of course, Anastasia at 13 finds her parents and their jobs horrifying. In fact, it was Anastasia’s father introduced me to Wordsworth. Her mother is a children’s book illustrator and her father is a poet and a professor at Harvard, and I think the Anastasia books were my first real exposure to either of those as actual jobs. Her parents clearly love and enjoy her, and occasionally find her exasperating, which she is, because all 10-to-13-year-olds are.

(Her brother, Sam, who has his own spinoff book series, is the prodigy of the two.) Anastasia is not Rory Gilmore-she reads a lot of books, but the adults around her don’t call attention to her precocity. Any time I meet a fellow Anastasia devotee, our love of the books serves as a shortcut to mutual understanding.Īnastasia is a smart kid who isn’t a Smart Kid. Lois Lowry is one of the biggest names in chapter books, and the winner of two Newbery Medals for The Giver and Number the Stars, but the Anastasia books, of which there are nine, are her cult classics. But one who is actually fairly ordinary, albeit in a special way: Anastasia Krupnik. Not a character who imagines themselves to be perfectly ordinary only to find out that they are, in fact, very special-so special in fact that their life’s work will be to shield an entire Community from the crushing pain of memory. With all due respect to Jonas from The Giver, my heart belongs to a different Lois Lowry protagonist.

Anastasia krupnik book series