The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
Barbara Robinson
The Best Christmas Pageant Ever looks, at first, like a typical type of children's book: the story of a Bad Boy, that invites its audience to laugh at a mischievous kid. But it breaks with tradition. First, there is not just one, but six bad kids. These are the Herdmans, an entire family of bad kids. Second, they are not all boys -- two are girls. Third, and this is a big difference -- it is traditional that the Bad Boy not really be bad, but just naughty. The Herdmans are naughty, but they are also bad. Finally, the humor of Bad Boy books is often on the limp side. But The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is actually LOL funny, for middle-grade values of "funny", which, since my intellectual development arrested at the age of seven, I still love. (No fart jokes, I am sorry to say -- but they would not feel out of place.)
The laughs are not always directed at the Herdsman kids, or even primarily. We are invited to laugh at
...the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others.
But not in those words! I often complain about books that preach. Really, most books do -- most authors have a point to make. Barbara Robinson doesn't explicitly preach -- she just invites you to laugh at the people who should be laughed at.