Anka M and Anka P

Author: Tatyana Mart
Illustrator: Sergey Gavrilov
Editor: Marina Drapkina
Publisher: KompasGid
ISBN: 978-5-00083-556-2
Pages: 192 (Offset)
Design
Weight: 492 g
Dimensions: 228x176x18 mm

One Anya lives in Saint Petersburg and has a sister in Moscow. The other Anya lives in Moscow and also has a sister—the same one who lives in Saint Petersburg. These third cousins are as different from each other as… Red Square and Nevsky Prospect! Muscovites and Petersburgers are very different. This is what the heroines of Tatyana Mart’s stories discover as they take turns visiting both capitals.
The two cities are less than seven hundred kilometers apart, yet people even speak slightly differently. In Moscow, for some reason, a white bun is called bread (even though everyone knows that bread is black), while in Saint Petersburg, they are not donuts but pyshki, and not apartment building entrances but paradnye. And besides, it turns out that Saint Petersburg could quite easily have been called Moscow.

Any reader aged 8–12 will easily recognize themselves in the heroines of these stories. The girls find themselves in a series of amusing situations caused by their different perspectives. But beneath the linguistic and cultural differences, the comparisons of the cities, and the heroines’ joys and quarrels lies an important message: to learn to understand another person, you must be able to see the world through their eyes. In essence, this is what the book tells younger and middle school readers, beautifully and slightly ironically illustrated by artist Sergey Gavrilov.

The young writer Tatyana Mart is a Saint Petersburg native, a philologist by training, a literary editor, and a reviewer for the website Papmambook, which is dedicated to contemporary children’s literature. Her works have been longlisted and shortlisted for prestigious awards. These new stories—lively and vivid—will appeal to children and adults alike, and to people living beyond the two capitals.
For younger and middle school readers.