2008 Newberry Honor Book

The Wednesday Wars

2008 Newberry Honor Book by Gary D. Schmidt

Life is not what it seems, that's what Holling Hoodhood learned in seventh grade. Since the first day of school, Hoodhood thinks that his English teacher, Mrs. Baker hates his guts. Starting at 1:40 P.M. half of Holling's class goes to Hebrew School while the other half goes to Catechism, except him, who is the only Presbyterian student who has to stay in for class on Wednesday afternoons with Mrs. Baker. This is why he thinks his teacher has gone into war against him. He tries to find "soldiers" to back him up but neither his mom, dad, or sister believe him. His dad however, warns him to stay on her good side because it might hurt a pending business deal with the Baker family. So, for his dad's sake, he does everything she tells him to do. At the beginning, Wednesday afternoons weren't so bad because Mrs. Baker had him do classroom chores such as cleaning the erasers. Then he had to clean Sycorax's and Caliban's, which are two rats, cages. However, after a month Mrs. Baker decided to introduce Holling to some of Shakespeare's plays. He thought cleaning rat cages was bad enough. By mid-year, Wednesday afternoons turned out to be enjoyable rather than a war zone. By the end of the story, Holling Hoodhood had survived the rat chase , the Shakespearean Plays, bullying, humiliations, and a young romance. Both he and Mrs. Baker learned not to judge a book by its cover.

This book contains many themes ranging from the Vietnam War and bullying to young love and friendship. I really enjoyed this book because of its relevancies to real -life situations that teenagers go through. I was taken back to my college years when several of the book titles or stories I read in the past were mentioned in this book. It even mentioned Treasure Island, which is one of the audios I had to evaluate for this class. I highly recommend this book to not only the students but adults as well.