The Wednesday Wars is a humorous Newberry Honor-winning Young Adult Novel by Gary Schmidt detailing the 1967-68 school year for one Presbyterian Holling Hoodhood, a seventh grader who is stuck in school every Wednesday with the new English Teacher. While his friends are off to Catechism or Synagogue, Holling gets to stay in class with Mrs. Baker, who hates his guts (according to him). She makes him do chores around the classroom, take care of class's awful pet rats, and read Shakespeare. He can't complain to his friends because at least he doesn't have Catechism or Synagogue, and he can't complain to his father because Mrs. Baker is related to Mr. Baker and Mr. Baker owns the Baker Sporting Emporium which Hoodhood and Associates needs to score the next architecture deal with, so he wouldn't want to make things difficult for the family business would he?
The answer is no.
Holling has a couple adventures, including an ordeal with box of Perfect Cream Puffs that the rats destroy, a play of The Tempest (where he gets to wear yellow tights and play Ariel), an architect deal gone wrong, and a chance meeting with his favorite baseball heroes. Along the way he learns more about Mrs. Baker and begins to think maybe she doesn't completely hate him after all, and maybe she's just anxious for Lt. Tybalt Baker to come home.
What starts as a fairly light-hearted and silly period piece of the sixties gradually introduces some pretty heavy stuff dealing with the Vietnam War and how it affected the people in different ways at the time.
It had a sequel in 2011 called Okay For Now, which focuses on Doug Swieteck, his troublemaker friend, moving to a new town and adjusting to life while he deals with his broken family, which was considerably darker. It also got another sequel called Just Like That released in early 2021, which focuses on Meryl Lee Kowalski, Holling's girlfriend, as she suffers from grief following Holling's right-the-fuck-outta-nowhere death. And if you thought Okay For Now was dark, this one's even darker.
The Wednesday Wars includes the following tropes:
- The '60s: The story lasts from the second half to 1967 into the summer of '68, and several references are made to big historical events and pop culture icons from that time period, including (and most notably) the Vietnam War, Walter Cronkite, Martin Luther King Jr., and The Beatles.
- Alliterative Name: Holling Hoodhood, full stop. A few people even pity him for it.
- Broken Pedestal: The famous baseball player signing baseballs, Mickey Mantle, isn't too thrilled to see that the last kid he stayed late for is wearing a stupid cape and yellow tights, and ends up tossing his ball back to him and storming out. Holling's pretty devastated, and his friend Dan returns his own signed ball after witnessing the whole thing.
- Childhood Friend Romance: Meryl Lee declared she's been in love with Holling ever since third grade, and that was basically the end of that as far as she's concerned. It's official by the end of the book.
- Deadpan Snarker: Holling, moreso in his head than out loud.
- First-Person Perspective: The entire book is narrated from Holling's point of view. He only reacts to things that he sees, so sometimes we're left to fill in the blanks on what happened before or after certain events.
- First-Person Smartass: Holling's pretty naive and mostly acts his age, but when he notices adults not acting like adults you better bet he'll snark at them in his head.
- Foreign Cuss Word: As foreign as Shakespeare can get, anyway. Holling reads The Tempest and is very taken by Caliban's improvised swear words. He gets really into using them under his breath and even teaches them to the school bully. They pepper his internal dialogue throughout the book. Even Mrs.Baker swears Caliban-style when the rats destroy the second batch of cream puffs.
- Funny Foreigner: Mai Thi. She doesn't know a lot of English and only says exactly what she means. When it seemed like Holling would cut his friends out of a Perfect Cream Puff and they started threatening him one by one, all Mai Thi said was 'I know where you live.'
- Internal Monologue: Basically the entire book. Sometimes Holling will give us an aside that doesn't really fit into his narrative but sums up how he was feeling or what he learned pretty effectively.
- Like an Old Married Couple: Holling and Meryl Lee. Holling just treats her like any of his other friends, and they tend to bicker a lot, despite her insisting she's his girlfriend.
- Long List: Played with. Doug Swieteck supposedly wrote '410 ways to make a teacher hate you.' The first few are pretty basic, like sticking deodorant into the teacher's desk, but we never learn the entire thing. Sometimes people will call back to the list to threaten Holling.Meryl Lee: I'll do 166 to you.
- Narrative Profanity Filter: When the rats first break free both Holling and Baker and the janitor just keep shouting "Oh!". At the end of the chapter Holling finally addresses this and says "in case you couldn't tell, we didn't just say Oh."
- Never Learned to Read: Doug Swieteck is pretty good at numbers and statistics and not much else. The sentences Mrs. Baker makes him diagram are pretty short for some reason.Here's the sentence she gave to Doug Swieteck: I read a book. There was a different reason why his sentence was so short—never mind that it was a flat-out lie on Doug Swieteck's part.
- No Name Given: Holling's sister is only ever referred to as his sister until the ending, where it's revealed her name is Heather.
- Odd Friendship: The whole point of the story is the bond Holling and Mrs. Baker form and the understanding they come to. Baker's pretty good at knowing what's good for Holling and tries to make him do his best, and once he starts to understand and warm up to her they get along pretty well.
- Sarcasm Mode: Mrs. Baker whenever she addresses the grammar of her twelve-year-old students.Mrs. Baker: Jaws drop only in cartoons and bad plays, boys.
- Soapbox Sadie: Holling's sister tries to be this (painting a flower on her face, advocating against war and racism, etc.) but shuts down when her father disapproves. At least until she snaps and runs away from home for a chapter.
- Suburbia: The whole book takes place in the nice town of Camillo, Long Island. Everyone knows each other and most of the kid's parents are pretty well-off, except Doug's and Mai Thi.
- Unreliable Narrator: Given that he's twelve, sometimes it can be hard to take Holling at his word. Pretty early on you can catch on that Mrs. Baker doesn't really hate him and just wants to find something productive to do with him, but to a seventh grader who'd rather not hang out with the new English Teacher, who got a bad first impression because she looked at him wrong, everything she does telegraphs some greater message of doom.
- World of Snark: Holling doesn't say much out loud, but you better bet he tears apart everything and everybody as much as a seventh grader can in his head. Sometimes other people like Mrs. Baker and Holling's dad get in on the action (verbally of course).
- You Should Have Died Instead: Mrs. Bigio the lunch lady is pretty distraught over losing her husband in Vietnam and lashes out to poor Mai Thi when she serves her lunch before the holidays. They both cry to themselves afterwords, but only Holling notices.Mrs. Bigio: You shouldn't even be here, sitting like a queen in a refugee home while American boys are sitting in swamps on Christmas Day. They're the ones who should be here. Not you.
