Daring a Happy Ending: The Wednesday Wars by Gary Schmidt

When Holling Hoodhood begins seventh grade at Camillo Junior High, things don't look so good. Holling is sure Mrs. Baker hates his guts.
That afternoon he starts looking for an ally at home. His mom offers platitudes and his dad blows him off because Mrs. Baker's family is a client of Hoodhood & Associates architecture firm. Hopefully, Hollings tries his sister Heather:

There was only my sister left. To ask your big sister to be your ally is like asking Nova Scotia to go into battle with you.

But I knocked on her door anyway. Loudly, since the Monkees were playing.

She pulled it open and stood there, her hands on her hips. Her lipstick was the color of a new fire engine.

"Mrs. Baker hates my guts," I told her.

"So do I," she said.

"I could use some help with this.... What am I supposed to do?"

...She leaned against her door. "Mrs. Baker hates your guts, right?"

I nodded.

"Then, Holling, you might try getting some." Then she closed the door.

And that's what Holling tries to do. It's not easy. His principal, who seems to be prepping for banana republic dictator, can't get his name right, and since he's the class's only Presbyterian, he is stuck with Mrs. Baker every Wednesday afternoon while Jewish and Catholic students are released for religious instruction. While doing classroom chores he lets her two pet rats escape somewhere above the ceiling tiles, and Mrs. Baker decides that Holling's time would be better spent reading Shakespeare with her, beginning with The Tempest. Surprisingly, Holling seems to get Shakespeare and with a push from his teacher finds himself in the local production of the play, starring as the fairy Ariel, "in yellow tights with feathers on my butt." When a bully plasters the school with photos of Holling in costume from the newspaper, Holling's status goes as low as it can go.

Yet Holling rallies, saving his sister from a skidding bus, taking Meryl Lee Kowalski on a Valentine's Day date to see Romeo and Juliet, leading the Camillo Junior High track team to a surprise regional victory, and coming up with the money for his runaway sister to take a bus home. Amid a background of the war in Vietnam, in which Mrs. Baker's son is missing in action, Holling works his way through Shakespeare and begins to work out his own future. Finally, Holling finds he has the guts to confront his father after the family attends his friend Danny's Bar Mitvah:

"Would you want to stand up there with all that stuff all over you and chant at everyone?" my father said.

. . ."He became a man," I said.

"You think that's how you become a man, by chanting a few prayers?"

"You think you become a man by getting a job as an architect?"

My father straightened. "That's exactly how you become a man," he said. "You get a good job and you provide for your family. You hang on, and you play for keeps. That's how it works..... So who are you, Holling?"

"I don't know yet," I said finally. "I'll let you know."

Holling lets the rest of the family drive away, his sister smiling in the back seat, and goes back inside the temple to dance at Danny's Bar Mitzvah party. He meets up with Mrs. Baker, where they talk about the ending of Much Ado About Nothing while they wait for a dance to end.

"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." she said.

"Suppose we can't see it?" I asked.

"That's the daring part," said Mrs. Baker.

The Wednesday Wars, a 2008 Newbery Honor book, is a whale of a coming-of-age novel. Set against the emotional turmoil of the Vietnam War and building political turmoil preceding the election of 1968, it is as current as today. Although Schmidt's book offers plenty of laughs, we know that getting to that happy ending is never going to be easy. Yet somehow we also know that Holling Hoodhood's happy ending is going to be well earned.