Anastasia Again

by Lois Lowry

Paperback, 1982

Status

Available

Local notes

PB Low

Barcode

1396

Publication

Yearling (1982), Edition: Reprint, 160 pages

Description

Twelve-year-old Anastasia is horrified at her family's decision to move from their city apartment to a house in the suburbs.

Awards

National Book Award (Finalist — Children's Fiction (Paperback) — 1983)
Nebraska Golden Sower Award (Nominee — 1984)
Texas Bluebonnet Award (Nominee — 1984)
Utah Beehive Book Award (Nominee — Children's Fiction — 1984)
Kentucky Bluegrass Award (Nominee — Grades 4-8 — 1983)

Language

Original language

English

Original publication date

1981

Physical description

160 p.; 5.19 inches

User reviews

LibraryThing member ohjanet
Anastasia, I could have been you. You are what Hermione Granger would be if she got stuck in a John Hughes movie. Can you please move next door to me and we can BFF?
LibraryThing member tshrum06
This is a great example of realistic fiction. Anastasia really goes through what girls at that age go through with making friends and family dynamics and boys and it really depicts, well, I think, the feelings someone would go through in a move to a different culture of sorts and how she
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adjusts.
Anastasia is a round, dynamic character. In the beginning she really does not want to move to the suburbs, but by the end of the book she has made the best of the situation and accepted that this is her home now and makes friends. We learn a lot about her, like how she thinks and feels, through her narration and her interactions with people. We learn about how she is adjusting to the suburbs and we hear all of her thought processes.
Age Appropriateness: Intermediate?, Middle
Media: N/A
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LibraryThing member Crowyhead
The Anastasia books are always excellent!
LibraryThing member EmScape
Anastasia has to move from the apartment in Cambridge she's lived in all her life out to the dreaded suburbs! However will she adjust?
I have always been incredibly jealous of Anastasia's life, ever since I was her age. Her parents treat her like a person and respect her input, her father teaches at
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Harvard, she lives in the Boston area, and now she has a house with a tower bedroom! (I do realize that Anastasia is fictional.)
Lowry has created a very realistic narrator that young people will relate to. She surrounds her protagonist with quirky, well-drawn characters, then puts her in some very common situations. Young people will recognize the plot lines from their own lives, and be entertained by the off-the-wall characters.
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LibraryThing member Arianna21
Intermediate/Middle
Genre: Realistic Fiction- This was a story about a girl who moved into a new neighborhood. People move all the time which is very realistic, but this is fiction because the author made up this family. It's not a true story.
Point of View- This was 1st person. It helped you
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understand Anastasia more as a person since she has some weird quirks. You also felt what she was feeling and empathized more with her because of it.
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LibraryThing member satyridae
Laugh-out-loud funny. The set-ups are maybe a stretch, but Lowry finishes them off so believably that one goes along, grinning all the way. A pure delight.
LibraryThing member apoffenroth13
This book was very unique. It was written from the perspective of Anastasia, a very opinionated and strong willed 7th grade girl. The story covers the summer before her 7th grade year when her family makes the move from the city to the suburbs. Anastasia, who was 100% against the move, soon begins
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to enjoy her time as she meets more people and discovers more of who she is through her writing of a mystery novel. (Realistic Fiction)
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LibraryThing member fingerpost
Anastasia's parents have decided to move from their crowded apartment in Boston to the suburbs, and Anastasia is not happy about it at all. She has all sorts of preconceived notions about what living in the suburbs is like, and she wants nothing to do with it. Once they move however, she begins to
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like many aspects of it. Her tower room, the cute boy down the street, and even Gertrude Stein, the old lady who lives next door. (No, not that Gertrude Stein, a different one.) I found myself laughing out loud frequently through this tale, particularly at some of the misunderstandings that Anastasia innocently gets rolling.
A nice plus is that Anastasia's parents, as well as Gertrude Stein, are fully developed and interesting characters in their own right... something many YA books lack. Adult characters are often treated as sort of cardboard cut-out background features. Not so here. I hope the whole series turns out to be as good as the first two books were.
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LibraryThing member NadineC.Keels
So...although Anastasia's moodiness is realistic for a twelve-year-old, and I can see why her sarcasm is meant to be humorous to the reader, I couldn't always laugh because even after enjoying Book One, I still don't dig how smart-alecky Anastasia is with her parents, and I couldn't find her too
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likable through the attitude.

Maybe the frequent uses of "good grief" and "for pete's sake" are also supposed to be funny, but the repetition got old to me after the first several times.

Also, the little account about a little girl's dad (not Anastasia or Anastasia's dad) making a movie where the little girl and her little friend (also not Anastasia) "had to run on the beach with no clothes on while he [the dad] took movies," and the moviemaker dad (of course) didn't tell his little daughter's little friend's parents he was going to do that, and Anastasia now giggles at the account about the other two girls, telling one of them, "It wasn't porno or anything, though. You were only seven years old, for pete's sake."

Um...what?

Not only is it not giggle-worthy, but children need to know before the age of seven how to recognize what kind of adult behavior toward children isn't okay, and a lot of children reading a novel like this would be younger than twelve.

No, it is NOT funny or okay for a man to tell his little girl and her friend to take off their clothes. (I mean, if the girls are out playing and they fall in mud or something, and the dad sends them up to his daughter's room to change clothes in private, fine. But this was obviously a whole 'nother situation.) Filming the girls and not telling one of the girl's parents about the "beach scene" is equally NOT okay, and it certainly isn't choice fodder for smirks or giggles in children's fiction.

I skipped ahead to the end to see Anastasia's attempt at novel writing, how she wants her story to be "sexy," but she isn't satisfied because she feels the story needs more "explicit sex" than the evil male character wearing nothing but a trench coat, walking around and flashing people.

(*Facepalm*)

I don't remember how far I got into this book when I was a kid, though I vaguely remember I didn't enjoy it as much as the first book. And now at my attempt to reread it as an adult, I see it hasn't aged well.

I normally don't add ratings to my reviews of books I didn't finish. But there it is.

I might revisit at least one more book in the series, one with an older adolescent Anastasia, because I remember liking it. I'm not feeling as excited about it as I did when I first decided to revisit this series, though.
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Pages

160

Rating

½ (100 ratings; 3.8)
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