The Wednesday Wars and Greetings from Planet Earth

Greetings from Planet Earth by Barbara Kerley, 2007
Set in the same time period as The Wednesday Wars, this book has a much different pacing and feel to it. It tells the story of Theo, whose dad is MIA from the Vietnam War. His science teacher, Mr. Meyer, gives the class an assignment inspired by the golden record carried by Voyager 2 to the farthest reaches of space: Who are we? The chapters – third-person accounts of Theo and his interactions with his mom, grandma JeeBee, his sister Janet, and his best friend Kenny – are introduced with short monologues in Theo’s voice musing about who we are, both in the cosmic sense and as an individual. His family has two unspoken rules that he’s figured out: If you pretend everything is OK, then everything is OK; and, Don’t talk about Dad, ever. By the end, he is ready to abandon these rules, and convince his family to do the same. I couldn’t help comparing this with The Wednesday Wars. While the latter shows how a year’s worth of events and experiences can add up to gaining a new sense of self, the former shows how uncovering one well-hid truth can change the course of a life.

Some memory-jogging tags: Vietnam War, fiction. Historical fiction. Voyager 2. Space program. Family life. Fathers and sons. Letters. Family secrets. Grandmothers.

MS Rating: Great.

Quotes: P 224: The mom said, “I never acknowledged the sacrifice he made, how much he had to give up. It killed him to leave you and Janet – he knew he’d miss so much of your growing up.” She closed her eyes. “You’d think I could have written and told him that.”
P 155: Mr. Meyer said, “I’ve met a lot of people in my life, Theo. People who truly examine things – examine themselves, even. And people who don’t I see it in school all the time – the kids who just memorize for the test and the kids who really want to understand. You’re someone who wants to understand. The road you’re choosing is the harder one. But your life will be richer because of it.”


The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt, 2007
Holling Hoodhood is the only child in Mrs. Baker’s seventh-grade class at Camillo Junior High that is not either Jewish or Catholic and doesn’t dismiss early on Wednesday afternoons to attend religious class. So Mrs. Baker teaches him Shakespeare. The story follows Holling through his school year, month by month, filled with humor, humiliation, clumsiness, family dysfunction, Shakespeare, friendship and first love, baseball, track, camping, and finding himself. Set against the background of the Vietnam era, I found this story humorous and very engaging.

Some memory-jogging tags: Vietnam War, fiction. Family life. Long Island, fiction. Baseball, Yankees, fiction. William Shakespeare’s plays, fiction. Humorous story. Historical fiction.

MS Rating: Great.

Quotes: P 118: Vengeance is sweet. Vengeance taken when the vengee isn’t sure who the venger is, is sweeter still.
P 223: I saw my town as if I had just arrived. It was as if I was waking up. You see houses and buildings every day, and you walk by them on your way to something else, and you hardly see. You hardly notice they’re even there, mostly because there’s something else going on right in front of your face. But when the town itself becomes the thing that is going on right in front of your face, it all changes, and you’re not just looking at a house but at what’s happened in that house before you were born. That afternoon, driving with Mrs. Baker, the American Revolution was here. The escaped slaves were here. The abolitionists were here. And I was here.
P 226: And I realized that the biggest part of the empty in the house was my sister being gone. Maybe the first time that you know you really care about something is when you think about it not being there, and you know – you really know – that the emptiness is as much inside you as outside you.