Anastasia Krupnik was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1979, the first of ten books about Anastasia and her family. Where Lowry’s later work would tackle dystopia and the Holocaust, the Anastasia series is pure comic realism — the interior life of a fiercely intelligent, opinionated, dramatic ten-year-old girl navigating the ordinary crises of childhood with extraordinary verbal skill.
Anastasia keeps lists: Things I Love and Things I Hate, updated constantly as her opinions shift. At the novel’s opening, her list of Things I Hate includes “Boys. Babies. My name.” By the end, her relationships to all three have changed — not through dramatic revelation but through the small accumulations of daily experience that constitute genuine growth.
The novel’s central events are Anastasia’s grandmother’s decline into dementia and death, and her mother’s pregnancy. Lowry treats both with a lack of sentimentality that shocked some critics: Anastasia’s feelings about her grandmother are complex (love, resentment, fear), and her feelings about the new baby are honestly ambivalent (jealousy coexisting with curiosity). The novel insists that children’s emotions are as complex as adults’ and deserve the same respect.
The Krupnik family — Myron (a poetry professor), Katherine (a painter), and eventually baby Sam — became one of children’s literature’s most beloved families, intellectual without being pretentious, loving without being saccharine.
Collecting Anastasia Krupnik
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1979): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition in dust jacket: $30–$80
- Signed first edition: $50–$120
- Without jacket: $8–$15