Wednesday Wilson Gets Down to Business

Gr 2-4–Third grader Wednesday Wilson is a budding entrepreneur looking for the perfect business idea—and trying to avoid her archnemesis Ruby and her friends, the Emmas. Unfortunately, an encounter with the Emmas at school forces Wednesday to invent a new product on the spot. However, with some help from her best friend, Charlie, and her little brother Mister, this might just be the opportunity Wednesday needs to get a new business off the ground. Wednesday self-identifies as mixed race and has two moms (“a mom and a mum, to be precise”), Charlie presents as white, and their classmates and other secondary characters are illustrated in a variety of skin tones. Grayscale images accompany the text on almost every spread and are rendered digitally in a wide-eyed cartoon style. Business vocabulary like elevator pitch and overhead are sprinkled throughout the story and explained in footnotes.