1. Gary D. Schmidt, The Wednesday Wars (2007) (1/1/23)
I adored this book. Set on Long Island in 1967, it is about seventh-grader Holling Hoodhood (surprisingly, Hoodhood is an actual surname) as he makes his way through the school year. On Wednesday afternoons, all the other kids in his class head off-campus for religious instruction—Jewish or Catholic—but as the lone Presbyterian, he has to stay behind. His English teacher, Mrs. Baker, starts out by giving him chores—cleaning blackboard erasers, cleaning the coat closet, cleaning the pet rats' cage (the latter with disastrous and long-lasting consequences). But eventually she switches gears and introduces him to Shakespeare. Which he takes on reluctantly at first, but once he realizes there are all sorts of great swear-phrases, he becomes more enthusiastic. He's also smart and, with Mrs. Baker's help, begins to use Shakespeare as a filter for seeing the world.
But it's not all Shakespeare. There's a local dramatic society that Holling is persuaded to participate in (in yellow tights with white feathers on the butt) in exchange for some cream puffs that he owes some fellow students on pain of death ("I never thought being in seventh grade would mean so many death threats"). Okay, the yellow tights are for the Tempest character Ariel, and that's Shakespeare, but it's much more than that. Micky Mantle gets wrapped into those events, which leads to deep disappointment over a hero. There's a camping trip and a bar mitzvah and cross-country racing and opening day at Yankee stadium. There's the Vietnam war as backdrop, and the deaths of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy.
With the assassination of Kennedy I stopped and realized: I was in junior high that year. Holling and I were peers.
The book is chock full of funny scenes—Holling has a wry take on life—but what really impressed me was how often I was moved by the depth of feeling and Holling's growing awareness of how he might fit into the world. Not as someone his parents (especially his ambitious architect father) expect him to be, but as someone fully engaged in his own desires and dreams.
Here's a section in the last couple of weeks of the school year, when he's read Much Ado About Nothing, which
advertised itself as a comedy—but let me tell you, it wasn't.
"Of course it's not always funny," said Mrs. Baker. "Why would you ever imagine that a comedy has to be funny?"
"Mrs. Baker, if it's a comedy, it's supposed to be funny. That's what comedies are."
"No, Holling," said Mrs. Baker. "Comedies are much more than funny." And she smiled again.
Whatever it was supposed to be much more than, Much Ado About Nothing wasn't funny. Maybe a line or two here and there, but other than that, pretty much not funny. I mean, talk about jerks. Claudio and Hero . . . would have a whole lot to do just to get up to where Romeo and Juliet were. First they're in love, then they're not in love, and Hero has to pretend to die (Does this sound familiar? Don't you think Shakespeare needed some new material?), and Claudio has to pine away at her tomb, and then Hero has to come back to life, and then they fall in love again just like that. Really.
Can you believe this stuff?
Because you don't have to be Shakespeare to know that's not the way it happens in the real world. In the real world, people fall out of love little by little, not all at once. They stop looking at each other. They stop talking. They stop serving lima beans. After Walter Cronkite is finished, one of them goes for a ride in a Ford Mustang, and the other goes upstairs to the bedroom. And there is a lot of quiet in the house. And late at night, the sounds of sadness creep underneath the bedroom doors and along the dark halls.
That's the way it is in the real world.
It's not always smiles. Sometimes the real world is like Hamlet. A little scared. Unsure. A little angry. Wishing that you could fix something that you can't fix. Hoping that maybe the something would fix itself, but thinking that hoping that way is stupid.
In the last couple of pages, Holling and Mrs. Baker talk about comedy again, discussing Don Pedro in Much Ado, who ends up alone, left behind by the happy couples.
"A comedy isn't about being funny," said Mrs. Baker.
"We've talked about this before."
"A comedy is about characters who dare to know that they may choose a happy ending after all. . . ."
"Suppose you can't see it?"
"That's the daring part."
"So you think Don Pedro ended up all right," I said.
"I think he became a man who brought peace and wisdom to his world, because he knew about war and folly. I think that he loved greatly, because he had seen what lost love is. And I think he came to know, too, that he was loved greatly." She looked at the strawberry in her hands. "But I thought you didn't want me to tell you your future."
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