The episode I hated most as a kid because it made me cringe so badly, but which interests me now, involves Anastasia's crush on Washburn Cummings, a boy in her school. Her father (who keeps drafts of his poems in the refrigerator crisper drawer so they won't burn if there's a fire) reads it aloud, and changes the F with his red pen to "Fabulous." Rereading it tonight, I got all choked up.
Westvessel rewards with an F because it doesn't follow the rhyming structure she's been taught. Anastasia writes a poem for homework, a lovely free verse poem about small quiet sea creatures, which her teacher Mrs. The action in the book is episodic, and contains the requisite number of cringe-inducing middle grade experiences and rebound moments. They come and go without any reason at all, rather like elves." "Warts, you know," her father had told her, "have a kind of magic to them.
The third-person text of the book is interspersed with Anastasia's changing lists of "Things I love" and "Things I hate," which she keeps in a private green notebook, and which provide a commentary on the action.
She lives in Boston with her father (an English professor and poet) and mother (a painter), and early in the book finds out that her parents are expecting a baby boy. She has freckles, big owl glasses, and a name too long to fit across the front of a t-shirt: middle-grade outsider, and thus someone I instantly identified with. In the first Anastasia book, Anastasia Krupnik, our heroine is 10 years old. No, the Lowry I adored was the creator of the Anastasia books. Now, I'm not talking about the serious, dystopian, later Lowry that you covered in your excellent post last week, though she is the Lois Lowry my students know - they've all read The Giver, and it blew their minds in 5th and 6th grade and set them up for a good time with Ursula K. I wrote about Madeline L'Engle as sci-fi and as chick lit, Cynthia Voight, and Paula Danziger, but the list would be sadly incomplete without Lowry. I have been meaning to write about my deep and abiding love for Lois Lowry for over a year, since we had that foray into "first loves": the YA authors whose books I read and reread until their cheap pages wore down, whose entire canons I owned, the books I can still practically quote from now, more than 20 years later. Apologies for the longer-than-usual grading hiatus! I somehow managed to miss the fact that my seniors' grades were due today until late last week, so further paper grading on top of the portfolios took away the Friday night I was saving for you and Lois Lowry.
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