Worst Week Ever: Wednesday by Eva Amores and Matt Cosgrove

Title: Worst Week Ever: Wednesday

Author: Eva Amores and Matt Cosgrove

Genre: Humour

Publisher: Scholastic Australia

Published: 1^st October 2022

Format: Paperback

Pages: 192

Price: $15.99

Synopsis: Have you ever had a bad week? Justin Chase sure has, and this is it! Monday really socked, Tuesday blew up, but now it’s … Wednesday! His cat is still mysteriously missing. He’s an unintentional internet sensation. And right now, sharks are circling as he’s stranded in a heart-stopping, skin-crawling, jaw-dropping, seriously shocking S.O.S situation with his unbelievably annoying archenemy!

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Last time we saw Justin Chase (not the famous singer) was on Tuesday, after he had been ejected from the plane he was in with his archenemy, and soon-to-be stepbrother, Marvin. Now, they’re stuck in an inflatable dinghy. Soon, they’re washed upon an island with a forest and buried treasure, and an S.O.S that he hopes will be seen very soon!

The latest in the Worst Week ever series takes place on Wednesday, and as some of the fans of the series and Matt Cosgrove’s work predicted, is orange! Poor Justin is really being put through the ringer – from an unfortunate toilet flooding incident on Monday, going viral for all the wrong reasons on Tuesday, and now, on Wednesday, he is stuck in the middle of nowhere with Marvin. Yeurgh! Poor Justin – he needs to get out of this and fast – and prove that Marvin is lying and making fun of him. The third outing is just as entertaining as the previous ones, with Matt and Eva creating an even worse day as the week progresses – they’re so bad, I don’t know how Justin is going to get out of this week alive. The raucous, outrageous adventures are fun and brilliantly executed, taking kids away from the realities they are facing and letting them have fun whilst reading – a very important position to be in whilst reading, because we want kids to read, and reading is FUN!

Justin is full of ingenuity – which I loved, and there were lots of times I wanted to shake Marvin and make him do the dirty work – seriously, how does he think he can keep getting away with not doing anything to help other than thinking up awful nicknames for Justin? I think their relationship reflects the realities of the school playground or sibling rivalry, even if it might be a bit exaggerated for the sake of humour. It works well because it reflects the world of kids and their imaginations.

To further complicate things, Justin’s mum has married a vampire called Vlad and they’re off on their honeymoon. Vampires are having a new heyday – they’re being given a twist on what has come before, so rather than the stereotypes we associate with vampires and the humiliation a certain sparkling vampire put them through, I’m really enjoying seeing the new takes on vampires with Vlad and the new Solomon Macaroni series – they’re lots of fun and I hope we get to see Vlad a bit more too.

Each day as I said gets progressively worse for Justin, and we can only hope that by Sunday, things might have calmed down for him. At least his worst week ever *should* be over by then, but maybe this is just the beginning for Justin – and we’ll soon have the worst month ever or the worst year ever.  But let’s let our hero get to Sunday first, okay? I am loving this series, a nice little break between the longer and at times more intense stories I read. Anyway, I’ve been predicting – along with Dani Vee of Words and Nerds what the colour of the next day will be, and we both thought orange for Wednesday. So – I think Thursday will be purple. What do you all think?