This book introduced me to the word "hors d'oeuvre" when I was a kid. I like that it unapologetically uses words like that and just assumes (correctly) that young readers will soak it all up even if they have to figure out what it means later. ( )

A long, boring summer — that's what Anastasia has to look forward to when her best friend goes off to camp. She's thrilled when old Mrs. Bellingham answers her ad for a job as a Lady's Companion.

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Anastasia gets her first job. What she thinks she's getting is being a "companion" to a wealthy elderly woman. What she actually gets is being a maid. She despises her employer, Mrs. Bellingham, but it turns out that Mrs. Bellingham has a granddaughter, Daphne, who is just Anastasia's age. And she's a major trouble maker. But all the same, they become friends.
Mixed in with this story is a serious injury to Anastasia's little brother, Sam, and a trip to the old neighborhood where her father grew up.
Anastasia's parents are still two of the most wonderful parents in YA literature.
All in all, a cute, funny, light hearted story, as the previous books were.

Note: Very small, but worth noting this complaint... Very close together, we learn that Daphne has mowed a Nazi swastika into the grass of her front yard, just to shock her parents, and that in playing a game of "would you rather" one of the options Anastasia's mother gave her was "Would you rather join the Ku Klux Klan, or..." These two bits, intended as shock-humor for the pre-teen audience, don't fare well today, and shouldn't have when the book was written (1982). Nazis and the Klan are simply not things to make jokes about... they are currently active terrorist groups, both with extreme racist philosophies. I wish Lowry had left these brief bits out and substituted something else. ( )