Anastasia At Your Service

Title: Anastasia At Your Service
Author: Lois Lowry
ISBN: 0395328659

Other Books in Series: Anastasia Krupnik; Anastasia Again!; Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst; Anastasia on her Own; Anastasia Has the Answers; Anastasia's Chosen Career; Anastasia at This Address; Anastasia Absolutely.

Plot Summary: Anastasia is bored, lonely, and short on funds. Her best friend, Steve, has left for the summer, and she is stuck at home in Boston with her professor father, her artist mother, her little brother Sam, and an allowance of two dollars per week. She gets a summer job working for a rich older woman, thinking she will be her companion, but ends up performing mainly domestic work. When she accidentally destroys a piece of the woman's silver and has to pay for it out of her wages, Anastasia finds that the job she applied for and the job she has now are two entirely different things.


Critical Evaluation: Though writing for middle-school aged readers, Lois Lowry does not condescend either to them or to her protagonist. Anastasia's parents never mock or ridicule her, respecting her ideas and opinions while at the same time providing a family life with reasonable amounts of structure and discipline. Although no genuinely momentous events take place in the course of this book, we feel at the end that the protagonist has truly grown and learned from her experiences.

Reader's Annotation: Anastasia is a young girl with intellectual parents and a precocious younger brother, at home for the summer in the suburbs of Boston with no friends around, nothing to do, and no income. She finds a job working for a wealthy, eccentric old lady, but the job - and the things that can go wrong with it - turns out to be quite different than she expected.

About the Author: Lois Lowry was born Lois Ann Hammersberg in 1937 in Honolulu, Hawaii. She was the second of three children, but her older sister died when they were still young, an event that would later be echoed in Lowry's books A Summer to Die and Number the Stars. Lowry and her family moved frequently from state to state, and sometimes country to country, as a result of her father's and later her husband's military careers. After her children became older, she went back to college to complete her bachelor's degree, and began to write and publish literature for children and young adults. She continued to write and publish through events such as her divorce from her husband, her grown son's death in a plane crash, and relocating to homes in Massachusetts and Maine. She currently lives with her companion, Martin Small, and continues to write and make public appearances.

Genre: Fiction

Curriculum Ties: Social Studies

Booktalking Ideas:

Hook: Anastasia's relationship with Steve Harvey
Approach: Character-based.
Ideas for Booktalk: Considers him a friend, but is there potential for romance? Physical distance of a person who had the potential to introduce her to new friends. Anastasia considers herself to have more "experience with romance" now than she did two years ago, but she is only twelve. Discuss how Steve fits into this.

Hook: "The Habitation of the Great Unwashed."
Approach: Scene-based.
Ideas for Booktalk: Mrs. Bellingham frequently refers to a lower-income apartment building using this term. Anastasia, having no idea of the implications, makes the mistake of repeating it in front of her father, who reminds her of times when their family had little money, but always bathed. Reminds her, in the words of Charles Dickens, to hold her tongue until she knows who the "surplus population" is. New awareness of class issues for a girl previously too young to understand them.

Reading Level/Interest Age: Middle School

Challenge Issues: Classism, mild offensive language.
Mrs. Bellingham has a low opinion of people not from her milieu, and utters classist remarks that Anastasia unwittingly repeats. Anastasia's mother makes reference to her daughter's lack of a bosom, and although not much overtly offensive language is used in the course of the book, the parents clearly speak to their children as future adults. I would argue that both Anastasia and her employer grow and learn as a result of her employment stint, and that Anastasia's parents are more concerned with the intent behind what their children say - and vice versa - than by the actual words.

Why I Chose This Book: I read all of the Anastasia books when younger, and enjoyed reading about Lowry's precocious, unconventional heroine and her eccentric family. This book has always stood out to me among the others in the series as a result of its ability to challenge not only the reader but also the protagonist. Young people who are not exposed to people from other socio-economic classes grow up accepting their family's situation as the norm; the realization that this is not the case often comes as a shock, particularly for middle-class children. Learning to recognize and accept the fact that people come from different backgrounds is a major step in the coming of age process; Anastasia goes through it with her usual quirky aplomb, making this book as entertaining to read as it is enlightening.