The best Halloween ever Book

Although Barbara Robinson's The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is a personal favourite I have loved since 1977, when it was read aloud by our fifth grade teacher, I really have not in any manner equally enjoyed her two sequels, The Best School Year Ever and now also The Best Halloween Ever.

For while in The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, the Herdman siblings often horrible behaviour is always tempered by the fact that they actually seem to totally understand the true spirit and meaning of Christmas and indeed oh so so much more than the high and mighty church going worthies of the town and indeed therefore do then also make the annual church Christmas pageant into something unique and special, in the sequels, basically and in my opinion Barbara Robinson just presents a pretty well standardly monotonous litany of one Herdman peccadillo and misdeed after another. And while in The Best School Year Ever, there is at least that scene where Imogene Herdman proves empathetic towards a little boy who feels lost without his security blanket, I really have not AT ALL either enjoyed or even appreciated any of the Herdmans behaving badly episodes in The Best Halloween Ever, finding the contents both annoying and tedious, and even the ending of The Best Halloween Ever, with all of the absconded candy being kind of "donated" back to the town's children, this really does not make the Herdman children and their all too numerous shenanigans any more appealing and The Best Halloween Ever anything more for and to me than a frustratingly lame reading slog.

Not terrible or inappropriate is The Best Halloween Ever by any means (although I do think some parents would likely find how horribly behaved and badly mannered the Herdman children are quite majorly problematic), but I just happen to personally find the one-sidedness of unacceptable Herdman kids behaviour pretty tedious and really too much on the surface (and therefore, I really only can and will recommend The Best Christmas Pageant Ever and neither The Best School Year Ever nor The Best Halloween Ever, as both of them are indeed much too narrow themed for me to consider recommending without caveats and reservations).