I have been listing The Wednesday Wars as a comparative title when I query literary agents for my own novel for the past year. However, until recently, I had not actually read the book. I was just going off of the recommendations of my mom, who taught the book as a middle grade gifted teacher.
On a recent holiday break, when I was bunking with my sister in our childhood home, I was nostalgically plucking my old children’s books off of the bookshelf when I noticed my sister’s copy of The Wednesday Wars. I had been in a reading rut lately and was craving something fun that I could properly sink into. The Wednesdays Wars proved to be just the very book I needed, in so many ways.
Offering a peek inside of the mind of an unlikely hero, a seventh-grader named Holling Hoodhood, this novel by Gary C. Schmidt takes the reader through a year in the life of a Long Island junior high school in the late-1960s. With antics one might anticipate from 7th grade boys, plus the underlying tensions of the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War, the book is both hilarious and heartfelt, cringy and poignant. Holling and his friends are right at the cusp of young adulthood and therefore constantly flirt with the line of ridiculous immaturity and wiser-than-their-years breakthroughs.
Indicated in the title, a key plotline of the novel is a “war” that Holling and his English teach, Mrs. Baker, supposedly wage against each other every week. As a young Presbyterian, Holling is left alone on Wednesday afternoons as the rest of his class either attends Jewish school or Catechism classes. To keep him occupied, Mrs. Baker assigns him various Shakespearean plays to read, which Holling initially assumes is a form of punishment, but comes to see the plays as relevant commentary on his own human experience—even if he doesn’t always fully comprehend what he’s read
“…and even though Horatio is hoping that flights of angels are coming to sing Hamlet to his rest, it’s hard to believe that there’s any rest for him. Maybe he knew that…Maybe he looked in the wrong places trying to find himself. Or maybe he never had someone to tell him that he didn’t need to find himself. He just needed to let himself be found.”
The Wednesday Wars, by Gary C. Schmidt (2007, Scholastic Inc.)
As I read The Wednesday Wars, I often wondered how I would feel about the book if I had read it at the age of the intended audience (middle grade/young adult students). I didn’t read much Shakespeare until high school and beyond, so I’m not sure I would have been able to appreciate the wittiness of some of the references at a younger age. As an adult, I really enjoyed the innocent lens through which Holling views the world. It’s not that he’s perfect or even naïve, he just isn’t yet skeptical of humanity, even though plenty of people and situations give him legitimate cause to push away from others. Instead, he leans in with a generosity of spirit and allows his mind to be transformed.
I would definitely recommend this book to others if you want a chuckle and perhaps a cry; particularly if you grew up in the 60s/70s and wanted to reminisce a bit about atomic bomb drills (and their pointlessness), sentence diagramming or the thrill of ordering a soda from Woolworth’s with your saved up allowance. Even though I couldn’t personally identify with any of those points of action, I still enjoyed being transported back to the not-so-distant past. Really.
This book may be for you if you also like: The Tempest, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, Julius Caesar, Much Ado About Nothing (or any of Shakespeare’s other plays); fiction; 1960s; junior high students; Long Island; New York; architects; expectations of inheriting a family business; the Yankees; unsung heroes; English grammar (particularly sentence diagramming); teachers; rats; cream puffs; middle grade/young adult novels.
Buy the book: https://bookshop.org/a/109412/9780547237602
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SDG
L.M.Beatty 