17 March, 1999

Anastasia Krupnik

The fluorescent bulb flickers above my head casting its pinkish light on the tagged books lining the shelves. I run a gentle finger fondly along their spines, familiar titles calling out for me to give them another read. But today I am checking to see if a new book is coming in. I have read every single one of the volumes in this series several times and I am hankering after a new adventure. I reach the end of the -L- row and it is not there. Heaving a big sigh, I pick up another book that I have read before and go back up to the front where the librarian smiles at me and stamps my card.

It was the 1985-86 school year when I read my first Anastasia Krupnik book. I was a frequent flyer at the library that year. My family had just moved back to the United States from an eight year detour in France and Belgium and I was attending a selective private girls' school on Philadelphia's Main Line. To make a long story short, the adjustment to American culture and the workings of an American middle school was very, very difficult for me. I was brainy (read books for fun), I was geeky (two long braids and glasses) and I was shy.

I was also taking French with the upper school students because I was already fluent in the language, having spent the last six years in a Belgian elementary school. Because of the way the schedules worked, I missed the middle school lunch hour, but I was too terrified to eat with the upper schoolers who were all four or more years older than myself.

So the librarian, Ms. Barlowe, who had gotten to know me very quickly cut me a deal: she waived the usual rule about food in the library and let me eat lunch with her at one of the study tables. I'd go up there with my little lunch bag and pick out a book and read while I ate. Then I'd help Ms. Barlowe out with various tasks around the room.

Over the course of the next few years, I read almost every single book in that library, including Lois Lowry's Anastasia books. Back then, I don't think I was aware of what it was about them that made me like them so much, except that she too had owlish glasses, felt awkward and had interesting liberal parents.

In the past few weeks, I've been ruminating a lot about my childhood, had a lot of memories sneak up on me by surprise. I got a hankering to read Anastasia Krupnik again. I also started thinking about books and what there is to read out there and things that I'd want handy to read to my future children some day. Anastasia was on that list.

So I bopped over to amazon.com and picked up the whole series along with a couple of Lois Duncan "thrillers", two stories by Willo Davis Roberts that I also remembered fondly and Ellen Raskin's excellent The Westing Game, which Julia reminded me of in her book reviews.

At the rate of about, one every two days, I've been gradually revisiting that period of time between 1985 and 1988 when I was a geeky teen so scared of her own shadow that she couldn't even order a pizza over the phone or pay for items at the check-out counter in the grocery store.

Happily, I find that the books are still just as amusing and enjoyable to me now at twenty-five as they were to me when I was twelve. Yes, they're much more transparent, but the humor and heartache of adolescence that Lois Lowry taps into is fairly timeless. With every single one of the books, I've wound up laughing out loud on the Metro, or in my office here at work, or while curled up in bed with Sabs snoring beside me.

Also, I now know what it was, that most likely appealed subconsciously to my teen mind in those books -- they show a young girl struggling with her feelings of inadequacy and embarrassment in the face of growing up, but she usually comes out right in the end, by learning to laugh at her mistakes. That was something I had a hard time doing for most of my life. But having Anastasia around, sure helped.