The Wednesday Wars
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50 free The Wednesday Wars trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
The Wednesday Wars follows Holling Hoodhood through seventh grade in 1967 and 1968, when he is the one pupil left alone with his teacher, Mrs. Baker, every Wednesday afternoon. He is sure she hates him. What starts with chores and escaped rats turns into a year of Shakespeare, running and unexpected friendship, set against the nightly news from Vietnam. This quiz covers the whole school year, month by month: the classroom disasters, the plays Holling reads and performs, his difficult father and rebellious sister, his friends Danny, Doug and Meryl Lee, and the real events of the era that reach even a quiet suburb. A few questions look at the writer behind the novel and the companion books that followed. It works as a comprehension check after finishing the novel, a ready-made multiple choice review for a class or book club, or a way back into a favourite. The first questions are the most approachable, later ones reward close readers, and every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which baseball idol refuses to sign Holling Hoodhood's ball because the boy turns up wearing yellow tights?
Mickey Mantle
Mickey Mantle tosses the ball on the floor, and Danny Hupfer hands back his own signed one in protest. Holling had raced over straight from the stage, still in costume.
Q 02Which fairy role in a Shakespeare play lands Holling Hoodhood on the front page of the local newspaper?
Ariel
Ariel is a part he gets only because the town baker, Mr. Goldman, needs a boy who knows Shakespeare. The Home Town Chronicle prints a mid-leap photograph that makes him look as if he is flying.
Q 03Which pastries does Holling Hoodhood accidentally coat in chalk dust while cleaning erasers for Mrs. Baker?
Cream puffs
Cream puffs baked for the Wives of Vietnam Soldiers sat cooling under an open window above him. His classmates then demand a batch of their own, a debt that takes him weeks to settle.
Q 04Which names belong to Mrs. Baker's two pet rats, which escape while Holling Hoodhood cleans their cage?
Sycorax and Caliban
Sycorax and Caliban were a gift from Mrs. Baker's husband, cute as babies before they grew big and scabby. They stay loose inside the school walls until spring.
Q 05Holling Hoodhood is the only seventh grader left with Mrs. Baker on Wednesdays because he belongs to which church?
Presbyterian
Presbyterian puts him in a class of one: half his classmates leave for Hebrew school and the rest for catechism. The only two friends who shared his church moved away the summer before.
Q 06Lieutenant Baker's telegram to Mrs. Baker promises he will be home from Vietnam in time for which fruit?
Strawberries
Strawberries are what every member of her class is holding in boxes on the tarmac when his plane finally lands. Holling refuses to describe the reunion, calling it simply a happy ending.
Q 07Who becomes principal of Camillo Junior High after calmly seizing two escaped rats by the scruff of the neck?
Mrs. Sidman
Mrs. Sidman had once given up classroom teaching after a student's prank stained her face for days. The rats dropped out of the tiles straight into her lap during a school board visit.
Q 08Which ceremony terrifies Danny Hupfer so much that Holling Hoodhood and friends spend lunch recess hearing him rehearse?
His bar mitzvah
His bar mitzvah, before a full synagogue, is where Holling feels he is watching his friend become a man. The sight sparks his boldest argument yet with his own father about growing up.
Q 09Which TV newsman does Holling Hoodhood's father watch every night, shushing anyone who interrupts the broadcast?
Walter Cronkite
Walter Cronkite's reports from Vietnam run through the whole school year like a soundtrack. By spring the entire family is watching together as the news grows grimmer.
Q 10Which adventure novel is Holling Hoodhood's favourite book before Mrs. Baker introduces him to Shakespeare?
Treasure Island
Treasure Island steadies him in a recess game against an eighth-grade bully, when he tells himself to show guts like its characters. He rereads it the night he decides his teacher hates him.
Q 11Which Shakespeare play does Mrs. Baker give Holling Hoodhood first, expecting, he assumes, to bore him to death?
The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice thrills him instead, and parts of it give him shivers. He reads it from a huge, smelly black volume with tiny print and decides he has spoiled her plot.
Q 12Which Shakespeare play does Holling Hoodhood rank almost level with his favourite novel, learning its curses by heart?
The Tempest
The Tempest delights him so much that he practises its insults in his bedroom every night after supper. He then tries them out on his sister, his gym coach and his lunch.
Q 13Which Shakespeare play does Holling Hoodhood find ridiculous, yet take Meryl Lee Kowalski to see on Valentine's Day?
Q 21In which suburban part of New York State is The Wednesday Wars set during the 1967–68 school year?
Long Island
Long Island lends its name to the Shakespeare company whose Holiday Extravaganza gives Holling his stage debut. With New York City so close, his school takes its bomb drills seriously.
Q 22Meryl Lee Kowalski's father wins a three-year job renovating which New York landmark in The Wednesday Wars?
Yankee Stadium
Yankee Stadium needed a classical designer, as Mrs. Baker learns from the players after a game. The contract rescues a firm that Holling's father had happily written off.
Q 23Whose presidential campaign does Holling Hoodhood's sister join, refusing a receptionist job at her father's office?
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet costs him nothing, because the school cook Mrs. Bigio hands him tickets she says she cannot use. He had only $3.78 to spend on the evening.
Q 14At which store do Holling Hoodhood and Meryl Lee Kowalski drink Cokes after their Valentine's Day theatre trip?
Woolworth's
Woolworth's was his sister's mocking suggestion, so that his date would learn at once he was a cheapskate. The friends end up spending every afternoon of spring break there.
Q 15Which flower does Holling Hoodhood take to Meryl Lee Kowalski's house to make peace after wrongly blaming her?
A rose
A rose, delivered with two Cokes, mends the friendship after her father copied the Hoodhood design. She later waves it, dried, from the sidelines while he runs.
Q 16What news about Mrs. Baker's husband do Holling Hoodhood and Meryl Lee read in a dropped telegram?
Missing in action
Missing in action is the verdict after his helicopter goes down, and Mrs. Baker runs from the room. She keeps teaching as usual while the whole town scans the nightly reports for him.
Q 17On which ominous date do the school board's visit and the running tryouts both fall in The Wednesday Wars?
The Ides of March
The Ides of March looms because Holling is reading Julius Caesar and takes the soothsayer's warning to heart. The sky even turns greenish that morning.
Q 18Which author, who taught English for decades at Calvin University in Michigan, wrote The Wednesday Wars?
Gary D. Schmidt
Gary D. Schmidt was labelled a slow pupil in elementary school until one concerned teacher turned him into a reader. His doctorate is in medieval literature.
Q 19Which American children's book award recognised The Wednesday Wars, the second such nod for its author?
Newbery Honor
Newbery Honor recognition had come three years earlier for his novel Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy. Kirkus gave the later book a starred review.
Q 20Which companion novel to The Wednesday Wars follows Holling Hoodhood's classmate Doug Swieteck after he moves away?
Okay for Now
Okay for Now opens with Holling saying goodbye to Doug and went on to be a National Book Award finalist. It looks back more than once to the day Doug met a famous ballplayer.
Bobby Kennedy
Bobby Kennedy, she insists, will end discrimination and turn America around. When he is shot in June she locks herself in her room, and Holling leads her to a church to light candles.
Q 24Holling Hoodhood is doing homework at Meryl Lee Kowalski's house when her father brings news about which public figure?
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr. has just been shot and killed, and the two friends watch the announcement on the evening news. The following Tuesday the whole school watches his funeral on television.
Q 25What does Holling Hoodhood win in his first big race and later give up to rescue his stranded sister?
A $100 savings bond
A $100 savings bond fetches only $52 when he cashes it early at the Commerce Bank, but that is enough for her fare home. He skips class that day to wire the money.
Q 26From which Midwestern city does Holling Hoodhood's runaway sister phone home, alone and down to four dollars?
Minneapolis
Minneapolis is where she climbed out of her boyfriend's car and refused to get back in. She rings late at night, when only her brother is awake to pick up.
Q 27Where is Holling Hoodhood's sister bound when she drives off with her boyfriend in a yellow Volkswagen?
California
California was already on her mind in September, when she told Holling he should escape there himself. She never reaches it.
Q 28Which Shakespeare play bores Holling Hoodhood so badly that he starts skipping over its monologues?
Hamlet
Hamlet gets a second, complete reading once Mrs. Baker hears of his shortcut and insists Shakespeare has no boring parts. Its silences remind him of his own home after his sister leaves.
Q 29Which Shakespeare comedy, the last play Holling Hoodhood reads with Mrs. Baker, does he complain is not funny?
Much Ado About Nothing
Much Ado About Nothing shows, in Mrs. Baker's reading, that comedies are about people who know they can choose a happy ending. She cites it when he asks how she can be sure her husband will return.
Q 30What collapses in the Hoodhoods' spotless living room on the night Holling's father is due to collect an award?
The ceiling
The ceiling had been leaking since November and finally comes down in a heap of mouldy plaster. Furious, his father shreds the white carnation he was meant to wear to the dinner.