The Wednesday Wars, Gary D. Schmidt. The year is 1967 and the Viet Nam war is full on. Holling Hoodhood, a seventh grader in Long Island must spend Wednesday afternoons with his teacher, Mrs. Baker, because half his class attends temple and the other half attends Catechism and being Presbyterian, Holling attends neither. He is convinced Mrs. Baker does not like him because she forces him to read Shakespeare plays. One Wednesday afternoon, hoping to clean the erasers like he normally does, Mrs. Baker asks him to clean Sycorex and Caliban's cages (the two white rats that her husband gave her, who is now stationed in Viet Nam) instead. Things don't go smoothly and the two rodents end up loose and make their way into the ceiling. As Holling reads the works of Shakespeare, he finds himself enjoying his words, yet isn't too excited to be performing in the holiday Shakespeare extravaganza that Mr. Goldman, the baker, bribes him into. He must wear bright yellow tights with white tail feathers, causing him to be the "butt" of many jokes and pranks. As luck would have it, the same night as his performance, Yankee player, Mickey Mantle is scheduled to sign autographs at the Baker Sporting Emporium. At the end of his performance, Holling gets locked out of his dressing room and his dad fails to show up as planned to rush him to the Emporium for an autograph. He grabs a bus, makes it in time, only to have Mantle not sign for him because of his outlandish yellow tights. Days later, Mrs. Baker has a sweet surprise for him that he won't soon forget. 

The story progresses through the months of the 1967-68 school year when Martin Luther King, Jr. is assassinated, as is Bobby Kennedy, his older sister's idol. We worry about Mrs. Baker's husband, MIA in Viet Nam, and others that have lost loved ones in the war. We delight in the budding romance of Holling with Meryl Lee, whose father is also an architect, like Holling's father. Tension brews when Meryl's father, in a bidding competition with Holling's father for designing the new middle school, presents the identical floor plans to the school board as Holling's father was going to present. This Newbery Honor book is a delightful read that will not disappoint. Be sure to catch up with some of the same characters in Okay For Now by the same author.