The Wednesday Wars

The Wednesday Wars

 by Gary D. Schmidt

Bibliography

Schmidt, G. D. (2007). The Wednesday wars. Boston, MA: Clarion Books. ISBN 054723760X

Summary

As the only Presbyterian in his class, Holling Hoodhood has to spend every Wednesday afternoon alone with his teacher when all the other children go for religious training.  Let the war begin, or not really.  There is already a war going on in 1967 - and it is in Vietnam.  A lot of growing up occurs in The Wednesday Wars, all set against the backdrop of Vietnam Era suburbia, with a lot of Shakespeare, a little romance, and fun for everyone who reads.

Critical Analysis

The Wednesday Wars is excellent historical fiction for middle school aged readers.  It portrays the true flavor of Vietnam Era suburban America without all the grit of an actual war story.  The main character, Holling, speaks in the first person through out the novel in the mostly true voice of a seventh grader, though he does have a beautiful grasp of language for his age.  Schmidt makes good use of references to historical figures such as Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and The Beatles.  Even though Holling is from a different era than today's readers, current middle schoolers will certainly identify with the universal themes examined in the book, such as growing up and war in far away places.

Review Excerpts

*Schmidt makes the implausible believable and the everyday momentous. Seamlessly, he knits together the story's themes: the cultural uproar of the '60s, the internal uproar of early adolescence, and the timeless wisdom of Shakespeare's words. Holling's unwavering, distinctive voice offers a gentle, hopeful, moving story of a boy who, with the right help, learns to stretch beyond the limitations of his family, his violent times, and his fear, as he leaps into his future with his eyes and his heart wide open. --Booklist

*Schmidt rises above the novel's conventions to create memorable and believable characters. --The Horn Book


Connections

*Available in Kindle edition and on audio.  I listened to the audio as I read the book.  I liked the way the narrator portrayed the children's voices, but some of the adult voices were "meaner" on the audio than I would have read them in my head.

     

* Expert from The Wednesday Wars

September Of all the kids in the seventh grade at Camillo Junior High, there was one kid that Mrs. Baker hated with heat whiter than the sun. Me. And let me tell you, it wasn't for anything I'd done. If it had been Doug Swieteck that Mrs. Baker hated, it would have made sense.

Doug Swieteck once made up a list of 410 ways to get a teacher to hate you. It began with "Spray deodorant in all her desk drawers" and got worse as it went along. A whole lot worse. I think that things became illegal around Number 167. You don't want to know what Number 400 was, and you really don't want to know what Number 410 was. But Ill tell you this much: They were the kinds of things that sent kids to juvenile detention homes in upstate New York, so far away that you never saw them again.

Doug Swieteck tried Number 6 on Mrs. Sidman last year. It was something about Wrigley gum and the teachers water fountain (which was just outside the teachers lounge) and the Polynesian Fruit Blend hair coloring that Mrs. Sidman used. It worked, and streams of juice the color of mangoes stained her face for the rest of the day, and the next day, and the next day-until, I suppose, those skin cells wore off. Doug Swieteck was suspended for two whole weeks. Just before he left, he said that next year he was going to try Number 166 to see how much time that would get him.

The day before Doug Swieteck came back, our principal reported during Morning Announcements that Mrs. Sidman had accepted "voluntary reassignment to the Main Administrative Office." We were all supposed to congratulate her on the new post. But it was hard to congratulate her because she almost never peeked out of the Main Administrative Office. Even when she had to be the playground monitor during recess, she mostly kept away from us. If you did get close, shed whip out a plastic rain hat and pull it on. Its hard to congratulate someone who's holding a plastic rain hat over her Polynesian Fruit Blend-colored hair.

See?

That's the kind of stuff that gets teachers to hate you. But the thing was, I never did any of that stuff. Never. I even stayed as far away from Doug Swieteck as I could, so if he did decide to try Number 166 on anyone, I wouldn't get blamed for standing nearby.

But it didn't matter. Mrs. Baker hated me. She hated me a whole lot worse than Mrs. Sidman hated Doug Swieteck. I knew it on Monday, the first day of seventh grade, when she called the class roll-which told you not only who was in the class but also where everyone lived. If your last name ended in "berg" or "zog" or "stein," you lived on the north side. If your last name ended in "elli" or "ini" or "o," you lived on the south side.

Lee Avenue cut right between them, and if you walked out of Camillo Junior High and followed Lee Avenue across Main Street, past MacCleans Drug Store, Goldmans Best Bakery, and the Five and Dime, you come to my house-which my father had figured out was right smack in the middle of town.