The Wednesday wars by Gary D. Schmidt

Reviews:

The New York Times - Tanya Lee Stone

There are many strands in this story: the Vietnam War, air raid drills, missing soldiers, a classmate who is a Vietnamese refugee, a rescue, extreme humiliation, chalk-covered cream puffs, yellow tights with feathers in all the wrong places and a bully. In fact, so much happens I wondered whether all the seeds Schmidt planted could flower by the end. To his great credit, they do. Still, while The Wednesday Wars was one of my favorite books of the year, it wasn't written for me. Sometimes books that speak to adults miss the mark for their intended audience. To see if the novel would resonate as deeply with a child, I gave it to an avid but discriminating 10-year-old reader. His laughter, followed by repeated outbursts of "Listen to this!," answered my question.

“The Wednesday Wars” takes place in a Long Island suburb and is full of the atmosphere of the late 1960s (“We listened to Walter Cronkite report on the new casualty figures from Vietnam, and how the air war was being widened”). For Holling Hoodhood, the everyday trials of seventh grade and the upheavals of the decade are complicated by some troubles of his own.- the New York times

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Publisher: Clarion Books; 1 edition (May 21, 2007)

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About the author

Gary D. Schmidt (born 1957) is an American children's writer of nonfiction books and young adult novels, including two Newbery Honor books. He lives on a farm in Alto, Michigan,^{[citation needed]} with his wife and six children, where he splits wood, plants gardens, writes, feeds the wild cats that drop by and wishes that sometimes the sea breeze came that far inland. He is a Professor of English at Calvin College. .

His most recent novel as of May 2007, The Wednesday Wars, was named a 2008 Newbery Honor book.-Wikipedia