The Wednesday Wars (review)

Holling Hoodhood is the only Presbyterian at Camillo Junior High, a condition that would have no significance at all except for the fact that, on Wednesdays, Catholic and Jewish kids are dismissed early for religious instruction, leaving Holling as the lone remaining student in Mrs. Baker's seventh-grade class. She's as perplexed as he as to how "the class" should proceed, and they settle uneasily into a routine of reading successive Shakespeare plays, which Holling interprets as a sure sign that Mrs. Baker hates him. Nonetheless, over the course of the school year—as divided into monthly chapters and narrated by Holling—they form a bond of friendship that sees him through rough patches at home with his bombastic father and flower-child sister and Mrs. Baker through the ordeal of awaiting news of her husband, who has just gone MIA in Vietnam. Mrs. Baker would feel right at home in the same faculty room with other such 1960s paragon teacher types as Sandy Dennis and Sidney Poitier, and it's no surprise that Holling comes to appreciate Shakespeare as deeply as he does Mrs. Baker, but running plotlines of both the manic and tender varieties—from rats behind the ceiling tiles to strained attitudes toward a Vietnamese classmate—keep the story racing along. Fans of the author's Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy (BCCB 7/04) may be pleasantly surprised to see Schmidt's lighter, even sillier side.