What do you think?
Rate this book
Sam Krupnik #1
All About Sam
Everyone knows Sam Krupnik. He's Anastasia's pesty but lovable younger brother.
This is Sam's big chance to tell things exactly the way he sees them. He has his own ideas about haircuts, nursery school, getting shots, and not eating broccoli. Sam thinks a lot about being bigger and stronger, about secret codes and show-and-tell.
Make way for your little brother, Anastasia. Here for the first time is Sam Krupnik's life story. What a life!
This is Sam's big chance to tell things exactly the way he sees them. He has his own ideas about haircuts, nursery school, getting shots, and not eating broccoli. Sam thinks a lot about being bigger and stronger, about secret codes and show-and-tell.
Make way for your little brother, Anastasia. Here for the first time is Sam Krupnik's life story. What a life!
135 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1988
107 people are currently reading
826 people want to read
About the author
Lois Lowry
143 books22.8k followersTaken from Lowry's website:
"I’ve always felt that I was fortunate to have been born the middle child of three. My older sister, Helen, was very much like our mother: gentle, family-oriented, eager to please. Little brother Jon was the only boy and had interests that he shared with Dad; together they were always working on electric trains and erector sets; and later, when Jon was older, they always seemed to have their heads under the raised hood of a car. That left me in-between, and exactly where I wanted most to be: on my own. I was a solitary child who lived in the world of books and my own vivid imagination.
Because my father was a career military officer - an Army dentist - I lived all over the world. I was born in Hawaii, moved from there to New York, spent the years of World War II in my mother’s hometown: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and from there went to Tokyo when I was eleven. High school was back in New York City, but by the time I went to college (Brown University in Rhode Island), my family was living in Washington, D.C.
I married young. I had just turned nineteen - just finished my sophomore year in college - when I married a Naval officer and continued the odyssey that military life requires. California. Connecticut (a daughter born there). Florida (a son). South Carolina. Finally Cambridge, Massachusetts, when my husband left the service and entered Harvard Law School (another daughter; another son) and then to Maine - by now with four children under the age of five in tow. My children grew up in Maine. So did I. I returned to college at the University of Southern Maine, got my degree, went to graduate school, and finally began to write professionally, the thing I had dreamed of doing since those childhood years when I had endlessly scribbled stories and poems in notebooks.
After my marriage ended in 1977, when I was forty, I settled into the life I have lived ever since. Today I am back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, living and writing in a house dominated by a very shaggy Tibetan Terrier named Bandit. For a change of scenery Martin and I spend time in Maine, where we have an old (it was built in 1768!) farmhouse on top of a hill. In Maine I garden, feed birds, entertain friends, and read...
My books have varied in content and style. Yet it seems that all of them deal, essentially, with the same general theme: the importance of human connections. A Summer to Die, my first book, was a highly fictionalized retelling of the early death of my sister, and of the effect of such a loss on a family. Number the Stars, set in a different culture and era, tells the same story: that of the role that we humans play in the lives of our fellow beings.
The Giver - and Gathering Blue, and the newest in the trilogy: Messenger - take place against the background of very different cultures and times. Though all three are broader in scope than my earlier books, they nonetheless speak to the same concern: the vital need of people to be aware of their interdependence, not only with each other, but with the world and its environment.
My older son was a fighter pilot in the United States Air Force. His death in the cockpit of a warplane tore away a piece of my world. But it left me, too, with a wish to honor him by joining the many others trying to find a way to end conflict on this very fragile earth.
I am a grandmother now. For my own grandchildren - and for all those of their generation - I try, through writing, to convey my passionate awareness that we live intertwined on this planet and that our future depends upon our caring more, and doing more, for one another."
"I’ve always felt that I was fortunate to have been born the middle child of three. My older sister, Helen, was very much like our mother: gentle, family-oriented, eager to please. Little brother Jon was the only boy and had interests that he shared with Dad; together they were always working on electric trains and erector sets; and later, when Jon was older, they always seemed to have their heads under the raised hood of a car. That left me in-between, and exactly where I wanted most to be: on my own. I was a solitary child who lived in the world of books and my own vivid imagination.
Because my father was a career military officer - an Army dentist - I lived all over the world. I was born in Hawaii, moved from there to New York, spent the years of World War II in my mother’s hometown: Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and from there went to Tokyo when I was eleven. High school was back in New York City, but by the time I went to college (Brown University in Rhode Island), my family was living in Washington, D.C.
I married young. I had just turned nineteen - just finished my sophomore year in college - when I married a Naval officer and continued the odyssey that military life requires. California. Connecticut (a daughter born there). Florida (a son). South Carolina. Finally Cambridge, Massachusetts, when my husband left the service and entered Harvard Law School (another daughter; another son) and then to Maine - by now with four children under the age of five in tow. My children grew up in Maine. So did I. I returned to college at the University of Southern Maine, got my degree, went to graduate school, and finally began to write professionally, the thing I had dreamed of doing since those childhood years when I had endlessly scribbled stories and poems in notebooks.
After my marriage ended in 1977, when I was forty, I settled into the life I have lived ever since. Today I am back in Cambridge, Massachusetts, living and writing in a house dominated by a very shaggy Tibetan Terrier named Bandit. For a change of scenery Martin and I spend time in Maine, where we have an old (it was built in 1768!) farmhouse on top of a hill. In Maine I garden, feed birds, entertain friends, and read...
My books have varied in content and style. Yet it seems that all of them deal, essentially, with the same general theme: the importance of human connections. A Summer to Die, my first book, was a highly fictionalized retelling of the early death of my sister, and of the effect of such a loss on a family. Number the Stars, set in a different culture and era, tells the same story: that of the role that we humans play in the lives of our fellow beings.
The Giver - and Gathering Blue, and the newest in the trilogy: Messenger - take place against the background of very different cultures and times. Though all three are broader in scope than my earlier books, they nonetheless speak to the same concern: the vital need of people to be aware of their interdependence, not only with each other, but with the world and its environment.
My older son was a fighter pilot in the United States Air Force. His death in the cockpit of a warplane tore away a piece of my world. But it left me, too, with a wish to honor him by joining the many others trying to find a way to end conflict on this very fragile earth.
I am a grandmother now. For my own grandchildren - and for all those of their generation - I try, through writing, to convey my passionate awareness that we live intertwined on this planet and that our future depends upon our caring more, and doing more, for one another."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 123 reviews
May 26, 2013
All About Sam was recommended to me by my first grader. "I just love this book!" she said. Obviously I had to see what all the fuss was about.
Lois Lowry is perhaps most famous for her dystopian Y.A. novels The Giver, The Messenger, and Gathering Blue. However, as a child of the '80s, I knew her for her heartfelt books about ordinary family life. I cried over A Summer to Die and Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye and laughed my way through the entire Anastasia Krupnik series. Well, it turns out that there is a Sam Krupnik spin-off series, too! It all started in 1988 with All About Sam. I must have been off reading Flowers in the Attic or something by then and missed it altogether.
Lowry makes the bold narrative choice to tell a story from a newborn baby's point of view. Many have tried to pull off an unconventional point of view character like a dog or a pig or a four-year-old trapped in a windowless room, but not many succeed. (Side note: I gave Room two stars.) Lowry manages to make baby Sam sound cute but never cutsie. Even as an infant, he makes interesting observations, struggling to make sense of the world around him.
He grows up a bit and gets into scrapes along the way. Lowry gives us a rare (and surprisingly welcome) glimpse into the mind of a busy preschooler. Audrey kept interrupting my reading to ask me what part I was on. "The part where he doesn't know what to bring to show and tell."
She would start chuckling knowingly. "Oh yeah. He gets in big trouble for that. Now what part are you on?"
Lois Lowry is perhaps most famous for her dystopian Y.A. novels The Giver, The Messenger, and Gathering Blue. However, as a child of the '80s, I knew her for her heartfelt books about ordinary family life. I cried over A Summer to Die and Find a Stranger, Say Goodbye and laughed my way through the entire Anastasia Krupnik series. Well, it turns out that there is a Sam Krupnik spin-off series, too! It all started in 1988 with All About Sam. I must have been off reading Flowers in the Attic or something by then and missed it altogether.
Lowry makes the bold narrative choice to tell a story from a newborn baby's point of view. Many have tried to pull off an unconventional point of view character like a dog or a pig or a four-year-old trapped in a windowless room, but not many succeed. (Side note: I gave Room two stars.) Lowry manages to make baby Sam sound cute but never cutsie. Even as an infant, he makes interesting observations, struggling to make sense of the world around him.
He grows up a bit and gets into scrapes along the way. Lowry gives us a rare (and surprisingly welcome) glimpse into the mind of a busy preschooler. Audrey kept interrupting my reading to ask me what part I was on. "The part where he doesn't know what to bring to show and tell."
She would start chuckling knowingly. "Oh yeah. He gets in big trouble for that. Now what part are you on?"
September 26, 2019
Adorable. This jaded reader has seen the trope too many other times to be enchanted, and Sam is just too too smart & curious (and his family too too heedless) but it's highly recommended to new parents and older siblings who need help understanding the perspective of a child who, for example, doesn't know that water pipes and smoking pipes are different.
Best moment is when Sam realizes his poor impulse control has gotten him into a mess and he tells his mom that he wishes he could spank himself (but neither of them want spanking to happen, so they decide to laugh instead).
I also recommend Socks by Beverly Cleary if you liked the idea of seeing the world through the eyes of a small being with a limited means of expression....
Best moment is when Sam realizes his poor impulse control has gotten him into a mess and he tells his mom that he wishes he could spank himself (but neither of them want spanking to happen, so they decide to laugh instead).
I also recommend Socks by Beverly Cleary if you liked the idea of seeing the world through the eyes of a small being with a limited means of expression....
November 14, 2012
We love Sam. He begins as a newborn infant, and we get to hear his perspective as he grows from babyhood to toddlerhood to nursery-school age. First, there's the frustration of trying to communicate when everything he tries to say ends up sounding like "Waaahhhh!" He learns to walk and talk, hide food like broccoli that he doesn't want to eat under the living room rug, and make typical mistakes like getting into his big sister's things and cutting his own hair. This would be a great book for older siblings with a new baby because it can help them try to see things from a baby's point of view. It's also just a joy for anyone to read because of the way Lowry captures so well the irrepressible joys and frustrations of childhood.
March 22, 2020
You know that moment when you read a book from your childhood and feel like you've suddenly been brought back to millions of memories?
This book did that for me. I saw it in a pile of stuff that my mom was donating and I stole it for my own collection because this book was my favorite thing to read when I was younger. I read it a million times. This morning I relived those times by reading it again and... what a precious story. I want to go and read every single book in this series now.
We're following Sam from the moment he's born. Literally when he's first seen by his family. It goes through his first... five years or so of life. Him, Anastasia, and his parents. The things he thinks and says are just so fun and I can't get enough. there are books about Anastasia that I want to read sometime soon.
This book did that for me. I saw it in a pile of stuff that my mom was donating and I stole it for my own collection because this book was my favorite thing to read when I was younger. I read it a million times. This morning I relived those times by reading it again and... what a precious story. I want to go and read every single book in this series now.
We're following Sam from the moment he's born. Literally when he's first seen by his family. It goes through his first... five years or so of life. Him, Anastasia, and his parents. The things he thinks and says are just so fun and I can't get enough. there are books about Anastasia that I want to read sometime soon.
February 3, 2016
Well this book was adorable.
I didn't think I could love Sam as much as I love Anastasia, but I do! And this book featured a lot of Anastasia and the Krupnik parents, so that's a win.
We start the book with Sam as an honest to goodness newborn, and follow his story until he's about five-ish. I read this book when Baby #2 was 6 months old, and it made me think a lot about what he's thinking/going through/etc. Obviously I understand this is a cute fictional story, but I always had the perspective with Baby #1 that I should constantly talk with her because who knew when she could understand me. I was getting a bit lazy with Baby #2 (mainly because I'm. So. Tired.) so this cute story was a nice, gentle reminder that even though we don't know what's going in babies' heads, it doesn't mean we shouldn't talk with them. A lot. Because babies are smart :) And talking with them makes them smarter :)
I didn't think I could love Sam as much as I love Anastasia, but I do! And this book featured a lot of Anastasia and the Krupnik parents, so that's a win.
We start the book with Sam as an honest to goodness newborn, and follow his story until he's about five-ish. I read this book when Baby #2 was 6 months old, and it made me think a lot about what he's thinking/going through/etc. Obviously I understand this is a cute fictional story, but I always had the perspective with Baby #1 that I should constantly talk with her because who knew when she could understand me. I was getting a bit lazy with Baby #2 (mainly because I'm. So. Tired.) so this cute story was a nice, gentle reminder that even though we don't know what's going in babies' heads, it doesn't mean we shouldn't talk with them. A lot. Because babies are smart :) And talking with them makes them smarter :)
August 24, 2021
First of all. The cheesy-ass cover photo needs to go. Bring back the classic illustration!
Reading this aloud to my boys as kindergartners might be my favorite parenting moment in life. It’s Lois Lowry writing with a character you want to scoop up and keep in your pocket. A million stars.
Reading this aloud to my boys as kindergartners might be my favorite parenting moment in life. It’s Lois Lowry writing with a character you want to scoop up and keep in your pocket. A million stars.
December 11, 2023
The best.
May 4, 2023
A fun story for little people. My grandchildren's most requested re-read right now.
October 1, 2013
Sam is a newborn and he's mad that he can't communicate to his family that he wants them to take his hat off. Later he's a bigger baby and he explains how he learns how to roll over for the first time. Then he becomes scared of the "terrible two's" his mom is always talking about and he's constantly looking over his shoulder to search for those scary "twos." His perspective is adorable and relatable to my kiddos. Loved this book!
Very cute chapter book for young kids. My 4 year old doesn't usually sit still very long to listen to his big brother's chapter books. But he loved this one, as it's told from the perspective of, first a newborn, and by the end of the book, Sam is probably about 5. Lowry has always been one of my favorite children's authors and will continue to be so. We're looking forward to more of this series.
Very cute chapter book for young kids. My 4 year old doesn't usually sit still very long to listen to his big brother's chapter books. But he loved this one, as it's told from the perspective of, first a newborn, and by the end of the book, Sam is probably about 5. Lowry has always been one of my favorite children's authors and will continue to be so. We're looking forward to more of this series.
August 28, 2014
One of my all time favorite books. I first read this in 4th Grade, after having borrowed it from the school library, and loved it so much I decided to copy it down word for word so I could have my own copy. I made it about two pages in before I realized that it was quite the undertaking, so I abandoned that project. But now I have my own (legitimate) copy, and have read it to my own kids. Such a fun story about a little boy. I love that it is written from his perspective. So fun to read!
January 3, 2017
I read the book as part of the "battle of the books competition" that the school I work for participates in every year.
The book was OK, I think it is definitely more for younger kids. I would probably not recommend it to the fifth-graders at our school, because I think they would be bored. On the reading list for the competition are definitely more mature books than this one. Overall, I enjoyed the authors other books much more.
The book was OK, I think it is definitely more for younger kids. I would probably not recommend it to the fifth-graders at our school, because I think they would be bored. On the reading list for the competition are definitely more mature books than this one. Overall, I enjoyed the authors other books much more.
June 16, 2012
I read the related Anastasia Krupnik books as a kid. This series, written for a slightly younger audience, is told from the perspective of Anastasia's younger brother Sam. The story really captivated my 6-year-old, who loved hearing about Sam's age-appropriate misunderstandings of everyday life that led to humorous (but always sensitively handled) outcomes. It was fun to read aloud too.
January 29, 2013
This story is so creative! I've never encountered another book told from the perspective of a main character who is an infant! Sam is a very opinionated little boy who doesn't mind telling things just how he sees them! the plot is pretty basic: just days in the life of a little boy, but the way he describes the events that take place make it very entertaining!
August 6, 2012
I was actually looking for The Giver, but the library didn't have it. I read this book when I was a kid and remembered how insightful it was, in terms of how little kids think. I think it probably helped when I became a preschool teacher. Anyway, it was nice to read it again.
July 23, 2014
I have a hard time rating this one. I loved it as a kid, but didn't love it as much as an adult. However, my kids loved it, so they're following in my footsteps. For my full review: http://sunlitpages.blogspot.com/2014/...
April 25, 2016
Sam has a lot to say.. and when he is finally able to, he does. Sam has a lot of ideas about pets, his hair, and school. Sam wants a pet, to get bigger and stronger, and have a "punk" haircut. This is a great chapter book for young readers.
December 27, 2016
Personally, I kind of hated this book. No plot and an unbelievable character with inconsistent development. But a few of my students have read it and say they loved it and thought it was hilarious. So at least kids can enjoy it...
February 1, 2020
Another Battle of the Books read with my elementary school kids. They enjoyed this book. (I personally agreed wit my teenage daughter who walking by one night said a 3 year old wouldn't use those types of words...
November 16, 2022
I’m closing in on finishing the Battle of the Books list for this year. Definitely would not have read if it wasn’t on the list. This book didn’t age well. It seems very dated. Not sure if current kids would have any interest in it.
April 24, 2007
I liked the Sam and Anastasia series.
February 9, 2008
Totally one of my favorite books of all time.
February 12, 2008
Hilarious!
March 11, 2008
This is a great read aloud to small children. My active three-year-old daughter sat in my lap and listened to the whole thing! (It just took a few days.) Very funny.
December 10, 2008
Sweet and funny, if a bit contrived. The misunderstood word device is hoary but still works really well.
June 13, 2014
I thought it was an good book.
June 17, 2014
Great book
I bought this book again because I remembered reading it as a child and loving it. It's a great story.
I bought this book again because I remembered reading it as a child and loving it. It's a great story.
October 20, 2015
This kid is soooooooo adorable...I don't know what to say. Iron the pump! #Reference. This deserves 6 stars but unfortunately I'm only allowed to have 5.
August 21, 2015
Read out loud to my kids. They loved it and kept asking me to read more.
March 19, 2017
Can't get enough of Sam!
July 29, 2020
2+. I wanted to like this, I really did, but it was just a sort of retelling of some of the Anastasia books from Sam's perspective with a bit extra added in
Displaying 1 - 30 of 123 reviews