Something Wiki

by Suzanne Sutherland

2016 Young Author's Award — Shortlisted
CCBC's Best Books for Kids & Teens (Fall 2015) - Commended


Instead of writing in a diary, twelve-year-old Jo Waller secretly edits Wikipedia entries to cope with the worst year of her life.

Jo Waller has three brainy friends, two mostly harmless parents, and one deep, dark secret: she edits Wikipedia for fun. But when her twenty-four-year-old brother moves back home with his pregnant girlfriend, Jo is forced to reconcile the idealized version of her absent, cool older brother with the reality of romantic relationships and the truth behind so many embarrassing health class videos.

With the young couple moving back into the family home, there’s barely enough room for anyone to move, let alone have any privacy. Throw in some major friendship turbulence, a seriously unrequited crush, and a mortifyingly bad haircut, and it’s looking like Jo will be lucky to make it out of the year alive. When you’re a pizza-faced dork who uses Wikipedia as a diary and would rather wear ancient hand-me-downs than shop at the mall, what’s the upside? Jo is about to find it in the most unlikely way.

• ISBN10: 1459728211
• ISBN13: 9781459728219
• Publish Date: 12 March 2015 (first published 19 December 2014)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: CA
• Imprint: Dundurn Group Ltd
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 160
• Language: English
• URL: http://dundurn.com/books/something_wiki

Reviews

[Leah]

Wikipedia is the font of all knowledge, and is usually my first port of call if I want to know about something - a celebrity, a TV show, a film, anything at all. It's great! So when I spotted Something Wiki on Netgalley, and learned that Jo was someone who regularly edited Wikipedia entries to mirror her own life situations. I was intrigued, and I couldn't wait to dive in to the novel.

Something Wiki was a younger novel that I expected - Jo and her friends are 12, and while they're not in my usual age-range, I really liked Jo. I found that her tale - where her rock star cool older brother ends up back in the family fold, with a pregnant girlfriend in two, and Jo's best friends suddenly don't feel like they're the best any more, and they're certainly not friendly.

Each chapter opens with an edited Wikipedia entry, and it took me a little while to realise what were the bits Jo edited, but I soon got in to it, and I found every Wikipedia entry was apt for the upcoming chapter, with Jo's chapters being very realistic. They were a super fun way to open up the chapter.

Jo was such a sweet narrator, too! I felt so sad for her to see that her "best" friends were deserting her, for reasons I still don't quite understand. When I was Jo's age, I had friends who did what Chloe and Stacey do to Jo and it made my life so awful to see people I thought were friends act so coldly, and meanly. It brought it all back and I felt so sad that Jo was being treated in that way. In fact, my only issue with the novel was that Chloe never told Jo why she'd started acting the way she did, and I didn't understand why Stacey just went along with it.

It was a lovely book all in all, the issues in the novel were all dealt with quite sensitively and the friendship thing definitely made me super sad. I loved getting to know Jo and her family, and especially Zim and Jen, Jo's brother and his girlfriend. They really were super cool, the kind of older brother you'd love to have in your life. It's definitely one a younger reader would lap up, and I would have loved a friend like Jo growing up.