Dead Wednesday

Gr 5-8–Dead Wednesday is a day filled with school-sponsored invisibility and unsponsored shenanigans. Intended to make eighth graders contemplate their mortality by giving them the name and identity of a teenager who died a preventable death and treating them as invisible, students instead take it as a one-day pass to get away with whatever they want. When Worm is assigned Becca Finch, the ghost of Becca decides to haunt him for the day. His mom keeps sending him urgent, cryptic messages saying he needs to get home or something bad will happen. Why doesn’t anyone else have their profile bugging them? What do his mom’s messages mean? Why are Becca and Worm together, and what could it mean? Narrator Kirby Heyborne’s unique voices bring the engaging, lovable characters to life. His versatile narration keeps pace with the author’s writing style of mixing the tongue-in-cheek with the serious. Heyborne changes tones easily and appropriately. The plot is well developed and will make listeners think. Together, the two do a great job of bringing Worm’s and Becca’s worlds to life. The ethnicity of the characters is unspecified but cued white.