This is the Anastasia book that I reread most as a kid, and I can't believe I had forgotten so much of the plot! The mystery story she's writing, the wallpaper peeling, "Gertrudstien", and the party culminating with Sam's, uhhh...moment. ( )

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 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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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 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. ( )