Gary D. Schmidt offers an unforgettable antihero in "THE WEDNESDAY WARS"'??a wonderfully witty and compelling novel about a teenage boy's mishaps and adventures over the course of the 1967'??68 school year.Meet Holling Hoodhood, a seventh-grader at Camillo Junior High, who must spend Wednesday afternoons with his teacher, Mrs. Baker, while the rest of the class has religious instruction. Mrs. Baker doesn't like Holling'??he's sure of it. Why else would she make him read the plays of William Shakespeare outside class? But everyone has bigger things to worry about, like Vietnam. His father wants Holling and his sister to be on their best behavior: the success of his business depends on it. But how can Holling stay out of trouble when he has so much to contend with? A bully demanding cream puffs; angry rats; and a baseball hero signing autographs the very same night Holling has to appear in a play in yellow tights! As fate sneaks up on him again and again, Holling finds Motivation'??the Big M'??in the most unexpected places and musters up the courage to embrace his destiny, in spite of himself.

SeptemberOf 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 wasnt for anything Id 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 dont want to know what Number 400 was, and you really dont 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 dayuntil, 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 whos holding a plastic rain hat over her Polynesian Fruit Blendcolored hair. See? Thats 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 wouldnt get blamed for standing nearby. But it didnt 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 rollwhich 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 Ten-Cent Store, through another block and past the Free Public Library, and down one more block, youd come to my housewhich my father had figured out wa

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Excerpted from The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt
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