REVIEW: The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt

The Wednesday Wars

By Gary Schmidt

After we closed the books, Mrs. Baker asked me to discuss the character of Shylock.

 "He isn't really a villain," I said, "is he?"

"No," said Ms. Baker, "he isn't."

"He's more like someone who wants..."

"Who wants what, Mr. Hoodhood?"

"Someone who wants to become who he's supposed to be," I said.

Mrs. Baker considered that. "And why couldn't he?" she asked.

"Because they wouldn't let him. They decided he had to be a certain way, and he was trapped. He couldn't be anything except for what he was," I said.

"And that is why they call it a tragedy," said Mrs. Baker.  

The Wednesday Wars is about Holling Hoodhood, the Son Who Is Going To Inherit Hoodhood and Associates Architects Firm. He lives in the Perfect House, right in the middle of the town, where he is not allowed to go into the living room, and everything is covered in plastic. His life is set out for him by his forceful father, who makes every decision in his life based on if it will help advance his career. Until one day when his teacher, Ms. Baker, begins an independent study session with him, exploring the works of William Shakespeare. He then begins to wonder who it is he will become.

This book was amazing! Schmidt’s style is intricate and clear as a bell. Holling’s life starts out very small, mostly petty school troubles. He sees things through a narrow lens: “My teacher hates me.” However, as soon as he starts reading Shakespeare, his world is gradually widened. He sees other people’s point of view, and he gets a glimpse into lives that are not his own. He starts memorizing passages, and using Shakespeare’s words in every day speech. He begins to see that his father might not be the man he wanted to be. That there are things worth fighting for. That there are many sides to a question.

And the beautiful thing is that it doesn't happen through one brief training montage and he understands Shakespeare and life all at once. He reads one play at a time throughout the year, and each play reflects what is going on in his busy life. When he is dealing with love, he is reading Romeo and Juliet. When he is dealing with his father, he is reading Hamlet. When he is confronting a bully, he is reading Macbeth. While none of the stories really have clever exact parallels like so many of the YA Shakespeare lit painfully does, his knowledge of the work sheds a new light on his life, as Shakespeare should.

Since Holling begins to see the world differently, he starts to make different choices. Bolder ones. Riskier ones. Life-affirming ones. He begins to stand up for what he believes in. He stands up against his father, and he finds himself. And the brilliant thing is, he does it as a middle school boy.

This book touched me deeply, not only for the transformative power of Shakespeare (which my mother taught me in middle school), but because of the relationship between Holling and his older sister Heather. I have a younger brother who is often much smarter than me in many ways, and whom I can count on to take care of me like Holling did.

I highly recommend this for anyone trying to show kids the power of Shakespeare, and any adult who knows the power of Shakespeare and needs to remember what it was like to be a kid again and to choose for yourself.

Here is my friend Drown My Books' review of the book!

REVIEW: All Men of Genius by Lev AC Rosen

All Men of Genius
by Lev AC Rosen

"Furthermore, I don't recommend emulating the behavior of any of the characters contained within.

They're all quite mad.

The truth is, I have no idea what I'm talking about.

Except about love. We all know a little about that.

Or nothing at all."

- Author's Note

This book is a basically a steampunk mashup of Twelfth Night and The Importance of Being Earnest. Need I say more? Well, I will anyway.

Violet Adams is not your typical Victorian girl. She spends her spare time up to her elbows in grease and gears in her family's basement inventing wonderful things. She is serious and bullheaded, and frustrated that because she is a girl, she will never be recognized for her genius by her scientific peers. Her twin brother, Ashton, is the opposite: an easy-going poet and all around foppish cleverboots. 

She hatches a plan to dress as a boy so she can enter Illyria College, the best scientific school in the city. Along the way she makes friends and enemies (an excellently bitter and entitled Malcom Volio), falls in love, fights against an evil plot, is awesome and smart, and fights an incredible battle to win her place in the scientific community. 

I. LOVED. THIS. BOOK. It is crammed with characters and references to both Twelfth Night and Importance of Being Earnest, but it is not slavishly devoted to either story. You get themes, characters, delightful flavors, and sometimes direct quotes, but Rosen makes them his own. For example, Mariah from Twelfth Night is Miriam Issacs, a "Jewess" born in Persia, married and widowed in Paris, and then employed as governess to Cecily (Cecily/Olivia). Miriam's relationship with student Toby Belch warms my heart. Cecily is as naive and youthful as Cecily Cardew, and falls for Violet-dressed-as-a-boy a la Olivia. Violet herself (after a long struggle) falls for Earnest, Duke of Illyria. Another example: One of the Professors is named Bunburry, and he rather accident prone. 

Like Neverland, it is nicely crammed, and there is hardly any space between one reference, and another, but if you don't know either play, you can appreciate the book for its own merits. And if you do know both plays, you will not be ruined on the story. 

It sounds complicated, but it doesn't feel that way while you are reading it. Reading the book feels like surfing, where you ride the rhythms of each section, and switch to the next wave of text as it comes. It is easy and exciting, and flows really well. And then, like a video game, you collect the little gold coins of allusion as you ride. 

The 3rd person point of view slides just as easily. Each character, including all the minor ones, gets their moment (or more) of perspective. You get to look through the eyes of of the all main characters, of course, but then you have moments when you are in the brain of Lothario Prism, the aging professor, to get his unique perspective on the science faire set up at the Crystal Palace, or Fiona, the burlesque actress Violet hires to be her maid, and who ends up seducing Drew Pale (a still pitiful, but happier Andrew Aguecheek). 

I also loved Violet's character development. At the beginning she was brash and fearless because she was naive and young. As she matures, she hones those features into a genuine bravery and strength of character. She learns that femininity is not weakness, and she that she can be both a girl, and fully herself. 

The book is also chock full of imaginative, steampunky science, which for the most part I loved. However, biology class made me cringe a bit. The biology class's sole purpose is to experiment on animals. Rosen does have Jack Feste upset when he kills an animal in his experiment, but the idea of "improving" animals (giving ferrets bat wings, or switching animal's voice boxes), while it lead to comical outcomes, made me uncomfortable.

Other than that, this book was probably the best book I have read on a long time. It is not a heavy, weighty tome of genius, but it was clever, funny, engaging, exciting, and had wonderfully detailed characterization.

Books like this:
Leviathan, Behemoth and Goliath by Scott Westerfield

ARCHIVED REVIEW: Hamlet's Dresser (5/4/11)

Hamlet's Dresser

by Bob Smith

"In sooth, I know not why I am so sad." - Merchant of Venice

Hamlet's Dresser is yet another memoir about how Shakespeare saved someone's life, and luckily I did not have to stop this one half way through.

Bob Smith is a troubled child, haunted and scarred by his unstable mother, his absentee father and his mentally retarded sister. He turns inward and finds solace in the words of Shakespeare. His life is rocky until he embraces his calling as a Shakespeare scholar, and, with this memoir, heals the wounds of his past.

Unlike Ghostlight, a plodding linear narrative that got stuck in the mire of his early childhood trauma, Hamlet's Dresser bounces around in time, from his childhood to his adulthood to various points on the timeline between. While this keeps the story from stagnating, it feels a bit arbitrary at times. Smith will finish telling a tale, and then plop you right down in the middle of it again a page or so later, which is disorienting if you care about chronology.

I did thoroughly enjoy his entry points to Shakespeare. Often, he would tell a story from his life, and then finish it with a quote from Shakespeare, and, juxtaposed, they would illuminate each other. You were able to feel the universal nature of the personal story, while at the same time discovering that Shakespeare knew what he was talking about.

He also excellently portrayed the effects of growing up as a child of a Catholic family in the 1960s, and the dents and scratches, and even lifelong burdens you get from careless things that adults and parents say. At a young age, when the world is still a mystery, you gather and retain information like a sponge, and something said in jest can reverberate through your head years later.

I do find it hard to review memoirs. It's not a fiction, or a piece of artwork that you can objectively analyze. It is a person's life, opened raw and naked, and told in the way he sees it.

Pushing past that a bit, I felt he spent too much time on his sister and his mother. His sister became a millstone around his neck, and though he loved her, he was always haunted by her half-formed presence, comparing her often to mad Ophelia. His mother would today be diagnosed as manic depressive or bipolar and she used him as a crutch rather than as a son. Several stories establish this dynamic, but they continue for half the book. Even with the jumping around, you don't get to the point when he starts working for a theater and becomes the titular Hamlet's dresser until about 3/4 of the way in.

However, this is an excellent book for examining the effect that high art can have on personal stories, not only Bob Smith's but those he loves. However, the pain of his story can often leave you exhausted and dripping with bits of his depression.

ARCHIVED REVIEW: The Dream of Perpetual Motion (8/9/10)

The Dream of Perpetual Motion

by Dexter Palmer

This was a very well-written book. It was very hard for me to get into at first because I had just gotten off the brutal, visceral and surgically precise style of Joe Abercrombie, so I had little patience for Palmer's dreamlike writing.

In this book, you often do not know who the narrator is. You think it's the main character, who says at the beginning that he is writing his journal, but then it switches to third person. It often goes back and forth in time, and uses the writings of other characters to augment the main character's point of view. Its one of those books where you know how it will end, and you read to figure out how it gets that way.

The story takes place at the turn of a century, at the beginning of an industrial revolution. It seems like a steampunk book, but you are never really sure what world you are in. All you know is that it is a world changing from an age of miracles to an age of machines, a metaphor for the transformation from childhood to adulthood, from wonder to apathy, that carries throughout the book.

The main character is Harold Winslow, whose made a choice early in life to have his destiny irrevocably tied to the famous and elusive inventor Prospero, and his secluded adopted daughter Miranda. At first, you think it is a retelling of the Tempest, but it turns out that Prospero chose his name and that of his daughter to mirror the characters in the play. He has tried to shape his life to emulate them.

At times the book is a bit disturbing, b/c the main character is very detached from life. Horrific things start happening, and they are made all the more horrific because we see them through the lens of someone who has no emotional response to them.

Recommended for those who like steampunk, Shakespeare, and books like The Book Thief (though I don't believe it is as good).

If you liked this book, you may like:

Fool by Christopher Moore

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams

ARCHIVED REVIEW: Fool (6/25/10)

Fool

by Christopher Moore

This book was extremely funny, and full of raunchy frolic, but I felt that it was lacking in depth. It may be b/c I've just finished reading The Blade Itself and Before They are Hanged, which spoiled me depth-wise. But I have also read and loved Lamb by Christopher Moore, and I liked that better. It had great jokes, but I felt that the world and the characters were really surface-y.

All in all, though, a must read for Shakespeare dorks!