collected
Fiction · Novel · Historical Fiction · Children's
About 5 h 15 min · at 30 minutes a day, about 11 days
Estimated from the page count of this edition. Dense books can take longer than the estimate.
Holling Hoodhood spends Wednesday afternoons alone with Mrs. Baker while his Catholic and Jewish classmates leave for religious instruction, convinced her Shakespeare assignments prove she hates him. It is the 1967–68 school year on suburban Long Island, and between classroom mishaps and the Vietnam War on the evening news, Holling faces a father who treats the family’s behavior as advertising for his architecture firm.
Funny and warm, this middle-grade historical novel tells its story through Holling’s exaggerated indignation. School disasters sometimes stretch plausibility, but the family tensions and wartime worries carry real weight. Shakespeare becomes part of Holling’s everyday vocabulary rather than a separate literature lesson.
Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).
Established
No, Shakespeare becomes part of Holling’s everyday vocabulary rather than a separate literature lesson. His conversational, witty narration and the linear sequence of school episodes make the story approachable.
Funny and warm, with serious family tensions and wartime worries underneath the school mishaps. Holling’s exaggerated indignation supplies much of the humor, though some classroom disasters stretch plausibility.
Family tensions carry real weight alongside the classroom comedy. Holling faces a father who treats the family’s behavior as advertising for his architecture firm, bringing identity and work into the coming-of-age story.
264 pages in the Sandpiper 2009 paperback edition.
Sandpiper · 2009 · paperback. ISBN 9780547237602.
About 5 hours 15 minutes at 50 pages an hour, based on the 264-page Sandpiper edition. Dense books can take longer.
Gary D. Schmidt is an American writer of fiction for children and young adults and a professor emeritus of English at Calvin University. His novels are strongly character-centered, placing young people under social and moral pressure while attending closely to the families, teachers, and friends who misjudge or sustain them. Historical settings recur, yet Schmidt approaches public conflict on an intimate scale, as in the friendship at the center of Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. He also treats literature and art as practical forms of attention: Shakespeare in The Wednesday Wars and reading and drawing in Okay for Now help young characters recognize possibilities obscured by shame, anger, or other people’s assumptions. Orbiting Jupiter brings the same concern with isolation, trust, and care to a foster child in contemporary Maine. Schmidt’s prose can be witty and conversational or spare and lyrical, but it remains direct. His overlapping characters and companion novels create a shared world whose connections deepen the individual stories without making them inaccessible on their own.
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Historical Fiction · Children's · Historical fiction
Kimberly Willis Holt
Historical Fiction · Children's · Historical fiction
Laura Ingalls Wilder
Historical Fiction · Children's · Historical fiction
