Anastasia tiene problemas (Anastasia, Ask Your Analyst) Book

This is the fourth Anastasia Krupnik book, and, like the third one, I'm pretty sure it's one that I read as a kid, though there was a lot I didn't remember very well. Anastasia is now thirteen and in seventh grade: the book starts in October, so we don't actually see any back-to-school/making friends stuff, which I like: it means that words and effort that would have been spent on that kind of scene-setting/establishing characters/etc. can be spent differently, and I think it works.

Like the other books I've read in this series, this one is often quite funny. There are three main plot strands (Anastasia gets herself in over her head with a science project idea; Anastasia deals with adolescence; Anastasia's younger brother, Sam, deals with a bully at preschool) and all of them have moments of hilarity. Near the start of the book, Anastasia comes home with a pair of gerbils, to the horror of her rodent-phobic mother; there is also a fairly hilarious conversation about how Anastasia thinks her mother must be going through menopause, because all of a sudden she's acting really weird in ways that Anastasia finds really embarrassing. The problem, of course, is actually that Anastasia is thirteen and hormonal, which her parents assure her is normal but which horrifies Anastasia. She says she wants to see a psychiatrist; her parents say she doesn't need one. But then, by chance, she ends up acquiring a bust of Sigmund Freud at a garage sale, and embarks on solo talk therapy with him in her bedroom.

This was a cute and fun read, but this book and the previous one felt like they had less emotional impact than the first two books in the series. I'll still probably check out the next one, though.