"We followed our government's drill procedures precisely and stayed under our desks for eighteen minutes, until the wind would have whisked away the first waves of airborne radioactive particles, and the blast of burning air would have passed overhead, and the mushroom cloud would no longer be expanding, and every living thing would have been incinerated except for us because we were scrunched under our gummy desks with our hands over our heads, breathing quietly and evenly." (Schmidt, Gary D., The Wednesday Wars, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2007)

The zeitgeist of 1968 is on every page, in every paragraph of this Newbery Honor book about 7th-grader Holling Hoodhood; it is replete with passages as funny as this one, but can also be searingly frank. Its scope is Forest Gump-esque, and it is every bit as hopeful and significant as that movie. The two-time Newbery Award-winning author Gary D. Schmidt has crafted a novel that promises to be in Middle School libraries and reading lists for years to come.

Holling Hoodhood thinks his problem is a teacher who hates his guts and the Shakespeare plays she makes him read on Wednesday afternoons while half of his class goes to Synagogue, and the other half goes to Mass. (Set in Long Island, Holling is the only kid in his class that isn't Jewish or Catholic). His real problem is that he doesn't know himself. While his older sister runs around with face-painted flowers in her boyfriend's yellow VW, volunteering for the Bobby Kennedy campaign, Holling is the unquestioning "good son"; the heir apparent to Hoodhood & Associates Architecture. Through reading Shakespeare's best plays with his teacher -- plays which uncannily resemble his own life at almost every turn -- Holling begins to learn what it means to be human in a crazy, unpredictable world filled with war, rats, ambivalent parents, and nasty 8th graders. His coming-of-age corresponds with the assassinations of '68, a surprise return home from Vietnam, and his best friend's bar mitzvah. While most of Holling's year is tortured and uncertain, the end is celebratory. L'chayim!

Any young adult book that can successfully meld the writings of Shakespeare, family life in the 1960s, and preteen anxiety with humor, wit, and heart is sure to take off. This one soars. If you read any young adult book this year, make it this one.