By Barbara Robinson
Every year the church Christmas pageant runs the same way, until the six Herdman children, the worst in town, take over every part and the whole place braces for a wreck that never comes.
The Herdmans are Ralph, Imogene, Leroy, Claude, Ollie, and Gladys, and everyone in town has them pegged: they lie, they steal, they hit smaller children, they smoke cigars, and once they burned down a neighbor's toolhouse. Not one of them has ever set foot in a church. Then Beth's little brother Charlie, desperate to get them off his back, lets slip that Sunday school hands out refreshments, and all six show up. By the end of the morning they've scared every other child quiet and claimed Mary, Joseph, the three Wise Men, and the Angel of the Lord. Nobody dares tell them no. And here's what nobody expected: the Herdmans have never heard the Christmas story, so they go find out what it says. And it makes them mad. Mad at the innkeeper, mad at Herod, mad that a new baby got laid in a feed box and not one person did a thing about it.
It's barely ninety pages and funny on almost every one of them, which is the first reason a child who avoids thick books will actually finish it. Beth narrates the whole thing dry and exasperated, so it never turns sweet, and that's why the last chapter lands the way it does. You spend the book laughing at the Herdmans along with the whole town, and then the story quietly turns and asks whether anyone was ever really looking at them. A child who has sat through the nativity every December of their life may hear it fresh here, because Imogene is hearing it for the first time, and she has questions.