Anastasia Krupnik
41 pages • 1-hour read
Lois LowryAnastasia Krupnik
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of illness.
Coping with Complex Emotions
In Chapter 8 of Anastasia Krupnik, Anastasia announces “I think love is one of the hardest things in the world to understand” (81). While Anastasia spends the book struggling with multiple emotions, this line perfectly encapsulates Anastasia’s journey toward finding positive ways to cope with the emotions surrounding major events in her life, such as her mother’s pregnancy and her grandmother’s illness. The most prominent way Anastasia does this is through self-reflection, shown by the entries in her green notebook. By making lists of things she likes or dislikes with reasons to back up her claims, Anastasia explores how she feels and why she feels that way—a positive coping technique and a major component to her emotional stability.
As circumstances change and Anastasia gains new information (such as feeling comforted by her grandmother’s presence at Thanksgiving), Anastasia is forced to rethink the stances she wrote in the green notebook. This process of self-reflection is a manifestation of Anastasia’s growth as a person. In addition, it highlights how Anastasia’s emotions change based on how she understands the world. By comparing her old opinions to her new ones, Anastasia learns to identify her emotions and understand how they affect her. This allows her to deal with emotions, even conflicting ones, and highlights the importance of turning abstract feelings into something concrete—writing in a notebook—to effectively process them.
In addition to the green notebook, the second major tool Anastasia uses is discussing her emotions with others. The clearest example of this is how Anastasia deals with her grandmother’s illness. At the beginning of the book, Anastasia dislikes even thinking about her grandmother, which results in her dedicating little of her green notebook space to the topic. As a result, Anastasia makes little progress coping with her emotions. She acts avoidantly because the subject causes her discomfort, and therefore does not initiate the self-reflection process. Thus, Anastasia spends several chapters believing she hates her grandmother because of the anger, sadness, and fear that thinking of her grandmother produces.
When Anastasia finally expresses how she feels about her grandmother in Chapter 6, she is able to think differently. Telling her mother how she feels offers the same benefits as writing and self-reflection, but it takes away the fear of thinking about the situation on her own. In addition, it offers the chance for Anastasia to receive feedback that her emotions are not wrong or bad. Rather, Anastasia’s mother expresses similar emotions, and this validates her feelings. In addition, the conversation opens Anastasia up to have more emotional discussions, such as the one with Mrs. Westvessel in Chapter 11. Not only does this discussion with Mrs. Westvessel show Anastasia using conversation as a tool for growth, but it also results in Anastasia deciding she doesn’t hate Mrs. Westvessel after all.
The Difficulty of Forming an Identity
Throughout Anastasia Krupnik, Anastasia struggles to establish her identity and define who she is. Her various attempts to do so have mixed results and highlight how identity is based equally in her desire to be true to her beliefs and her desire to fit in. At the beginning of the book, Anastasia makes generalizations without knowing all the facts and uses these false beliefs to define who she is. An example is when Anastasia compares her grandmother to the grandmothers of her friends, who are younger and in good health, and this leads Anastasia to conclude her situation is unique because “nobody else’s grandmother was ninety-two” (58). In truth, Anastasia’s conclusion is false because it is based solely on her discomfort and feeling of isolation from her peers. While the grandmothers of the people she knows are not 92 and ill, this does not mean that “nobody else’s” grandmother is 92 and ill. As a result, Anastasia establishes an identity for herself as an outlier in a negative way. Her grandmother’s age doesn’t define who Anastasia is, and having an older grandmother isn’t a bad thing, but since her main desire is to fit in, her grandmother’s difference is just another aspect of her life that makes her feel like she doesn’t belong.
Anastasia’s desire to seem “normal” drives much of her quest for an identity. In Chapter 3 Anastasia decides to become Catholic because that would make her part of the majority group among her peers. At this point, the text explores the idea that belonging to religion helps people form a strong sense of identity because it includes social, spiritual, and personal aspects of one’s life, and having a strong set of beliefs and participating in a tight-knit community cements a sense of stability and belonging. However, Anastasia doesn’t feel like these things are missing in her life. The idea of giving up her individual thoughts and emotions to fit in with a Catholic worldview makes Anastasia appreciate her uniqueness in a new way, and she realizes that being Catholic feels at odds with how she defines herself.
Anastasia’s choice not to become Catholic highlights how her identity is rooted in being true to who she is, regardless of whether those traits place her in the majority or not. Anastasia feels equally strongly about staying true to herself as she does about believing she’s alone in her experience of having a 92-year-old grandmother. Together, the truth and inaccuracies in Anastasia’s journey to form an identity show that the process is complex by nature and will require time, trial, and error.
The Pressure to Act in the Face of Uncertainty
Through Anastasia’s perspective, Anastasia Krupnik explores the tendency for childhood to feel rushed and uncertain. At many points throughout the book, Anastasia observes that a pending event will change her life significantly, even though she has never experienced the event in question. Anastasia’s conclusions are based on the newness of her experiences and the formative impact that events have on adolescents when they are encountering them for the first time. With the upcoming birth of her little brother, Anastasia believes she must act quickly to cement her place in her family before her brother is born and upends her relationship with her parents. This situation adds to the pressure she already faces to fit in with her peers and define a solid sense of identity.
Similarly, Anastasia feels urgency to accomplish something noteworthy. With creative, accomplished parents, Anastasia is frustrated that her efforts haven’t been formally recognized. This is exemplified by her belief that she must do something to warrant having a nameplate made for herself by the time she is 12. This highlights Anastasia’s driven nature and, simultaneously, her lack of experience with things like building a career or an artistic body of work. Twelve seems “old” to her 10-year-old self, practically synonymous with being an adult, like her parents. This perspective reflects how youth makes Anastasia feel the need to keep up a frantic pace of accomplishment that is actually unnecessary.
Anastasia’s feeling of constant pressure drives her need to quickly establish a sense of understanding about life. After discussing the poem about memory and happiness with her father, Anastasia realizes the “inward eye” mentioned in the poem is both a metaphor for the happiness of memory and for how looking back offers perspective for moving forward. Initially, Anastasia uses the poem as a way to slow herself down and be in the moment. Since she is young and does not yet have many memories, she concludes “I guess I don’t need ‘the inward eye,’ yet, to be happy” (73). However, in the very next chapter, Anastasia turns this idea on its head, highlighting how the pressure to mature wins out. Rather than being content to gather memories as she grows, Anastasia decides that she must hurry to make memories so she can be happy and understand the world.
Anastasia’s experience with the poem reveals that with her youthful perspective, she will have to try multiple approaches to problems and situations before she finds the best answer. The pressure to act without having a lot of background knowledge or experience means that she—and other young people—will make mistakes. The adult characters in the book try to assure her that this is part of growing up, but Anastasia still feels uncomfortable encountering so much uncertainty and wishes she had easy answers. Her green notebook is a tool she uses to slow down her decision making, giving her space to acknowledge and process situations and letting her come to her own conclusions.
Unlock every key theme and why it matters
Get in-depth breakdowns of the book’s main ideas and how they connect and evolve.
- Explore how themes develop throughout the text
- Connect themes to characters, events, and symbols
- Support essays and discussions with thematic evidence