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The Herdmans #3

Achtung, Die Herdmanns Sind Zurück

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Rare Book

112 pages, Hardcover

First published July 27, 2004

158 people are currently reading
1430 people want to read

About the author

Barbara Robinson

73 books218 followers
I grew up in a southern Ohio river town -- Portsmouth -- and that small town atmosphere has affected most of my writing.
My mother, widowed when I was three years old, taught school for forty-nine years in that same small town, and her major (indeed, only) extravagance was books. I grew up with, and quickly adopted, the notion that reading was the only way to fill up every scrap of loose time you could snatch.

I had the benefit, as well, of a wide variety of aunts and uncles and cousins, plus the extended family so common to small town life -- the neighbors, friends, teachers, bus drivers, mailmen, local heroes and local neâer-do-wells, and even a local blacksmith...great stuff to feed the imagination.

I began writing very early -- poems, plays, stories -- and just never quit. I attended local schools and then, being both book-struck and stage-struck, found a college -- Allegheny College -- where I could satisfy both passions.

I've been a short story writer, with some forty-fifty stories in McCall's, Ladies' Home Journal, Redbook, etc.; a playwright; an occasional poet, and finally and most happily, an author of children's books...happily, because there's no greater audience than boys and girls who read books and demand that those books be the most exciting, the most mysterious, the most touching, the funniest...the Best.

I live and write in a suburb of Philadelphia, and I have two daughters -- Carolyn, who is a nurse, and Marjorie, who is a sixth grade teacher and at home now with my grandchildren Tomas and Marcos, and all these people read books like crazy!

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5 stars
711 (25%)
4 stars
917 (32%)
3 stars
899 (31%)
2 stars
238 (8%)
1 star
62 (2%)
Displaying 1 - 30 of 451 reviews
Profile Image for Matt.
4,824 reviews13.1k followers
December 2, 2023
The least exciting of the three stories in this collection.

How do you protect the town at Hallowe'en with the Herdmans on the loose? Cancel the trick-or-treating and keep the candy away from a potential blackmail or bartering situation. When the Woodrow Wilson PTA decide to host a Hallowe'en night event, everyone cowers in fear, until they learn the Herdmans won't attend. With the event moving forward, a few strange events occur, though no one has seen that group of six unruly children, so it must have been an outside source...right?

Robinson has now passed on, but she left children a trio of highly humerous stories that allow for hours of laughter and entertainment.

Like/hate the review? An ever-growing collection of others appears at:
http://pecheyponderings.wordpress.com/
Profile Image for Christy.
4,542 reviews35.9k followers
October 30, 2023
3.5 stars

This was a cute middle grade Halloween book. I didn't enjoy it as much as the Christmas one by this author, but still a nice and quick holiday read!
Audio book source: Hoopla
Story Rating: 3.5 stars
Narrators: Elaine Stritch
Narration Rating: 3.5 stars
Genre: Middle Grade
Length: 1h 25m


Profile Image for Manybooks.
3,815 reviews101 followers
October 6, 2020
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).
Profile Image for Sheila.
3,092 reviews123 followers
February 16, 2025
I really enjoyed this book. The Herdmans are always surprising me.
Profile Image for Empress Reece (Hooked on Books).
915 reviews82 followers
September 11, 2016
The Worst Best Halloween Book Ever...

So my son needs to get 24 AR (Accelerated Reading) points this month and I needed a Halloween book to read for my Halloween Book Bingo: "Set on Halloween" square so I thought we could kill two birds with one stone so to speak, by listening to this audio book in the car on the way too & from school. The book has a grade reading level of 5.5 and an interest level for grades 3-5 so since Reece is in 5th grade I thought it might just work.
Well it didn't! And I read somewhere that this sequel came 30 years after the last book so you would think if it was that long in the making it would be a 5 star read but it read like it took 30 minutes to write not 30 years. It was a complete dud! He didn't like it and neither did I. Some of the subject matter seemed more appropriate for older kids in 3rd -5th but the delivery was terrible and geared more toward Kindergarten through 1st grade students. The author repeated the same thing over and over again and the plot was so thin it was practically non-existent. The only reason we even suffered through to the end is so Reece could go ahead & take an AR test on it but since neither one of us liked it, I definitely would not recommend to any older kids or adults. 

*I read this for my 2016 Halloween Book Bingo:~Set on Halloween~square&
Profile Image for Michael.
1,297 reviews155 followers
October 17, 2008
After creating havoc at Christmas, the Herdmans are back. This time, their previous antics lead the town to cancel Halloween since the holiday has devolved into little more than the Herdman family laying in wait to beat up and steal unsuspecting trick-or-treaters candy.

This sequel to "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" is a bit of a one-joke story, spread out over the course of a hundred or so pages. The central conflict is the Herdman's have led the town to cancel Halloween, which makes all the kids upset. Then, the town hatches a plan to have Halloween at the local school so they can control what's going on and in the hopes that the Herdmans won't find out or show up.

The strength of "Christmas Pageant" was while the Herdmans were the antagonists of the story, they had a human side and flashes of being more than just a bunch of surly bullies. And that's not quite the case here, where the entire book is spent talking about how horrible they are. It does lead to a nice little moment at the end involving the Herdmans and years of stolen Halloween candy, but the moments leading up to it are a bit repetitive and difficult to stomach.

Had I not read "Best Christmas Pageant" I might be more inclined to like this novel. Or maybe the big problem is this book is competing with the memory of enjoying "Pageant" in my youth.
Profile Image for Tatevik.
570 reviews113 followers
December 25, 2020
This one was not as funny as the other two, and somehow seemed longer. But still I liked it. I love the idea of the author to show that no matter how naughty and bully kids can be sometimes, there is still good and kindness.
P.S. I wonder how these Herdmans would grow up to be...
59 reviews4 followers
February 21, 2016
Maybe I'm just having a sensitive moment here, but one major aspect of this book really bothered me. The Herdmans within this book are bullies, thieves, and troublemakers that don't pay attention in school and don't read the paper and seem to abuse animals on a regular basis. Fine. Dennis the Menace types. No problem there. But then it's emphasized throughout the book just how poor, white-trashy the Herdmans are by presenting them as this ridiculous stereotype of a poor family. The mother is a single mother that doesn't even stay home much raising (or failing to raise) six kids in a small apartment over a garage with a junked up yard full of garbage. The book mentions that the Herdmans "looked like Halloween all year" and that sometimes the other kids would dress up as Herdmans for Halloween. And toward the end of the book, it's revealed that the Herdmans are on welfare when someone complains about donuts being donated to the welfare department and so, "You know who those are going to!" While, yes, by the end it is the actions of the Herdman kids that make this Halloween the best ever, (that shouldn't be a surprise, so I'm not worried about it as a spoiler) that doesn't really make up for the rest of the book normalizing, for kids, this classist idea that the poverty-stricken are all criminals and thugs that need to be watched and protected against and that it's perfectly okay to just wish they'd all go away or to try to marginalize them within the community and exclude them. I really just couldn't get over how much that irked me in this book.
Profile Image for Toni.
13 reviews2 followers
December 10, 2008
My class is using this book as a read-aloud and they are loving it and making all kinds of text to text connections with The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.
Profile Image for Janette Walters.
184 reviews94 followers
October 22, 2025
3.5 stars rounded up. A cute middle grade Halloween tale. I’ve never read Robinson’s, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. So I checked it out from my library to begin some holiday reading in November.
Profile Image for s.
155 reviews
Read
March 11, 2021
it's the middle of the night and i just remembered i loved these books in elementary school and had to do some digging to find out what exactly they were
Profile Image for Cade.
651 reviews43 followers
December 22, 2019
Meh...The Best Christmas Pageant Ever is one of my all time favorite books, but the 2 follow ups are mediocre at best.
Profile Image for Tarissa.
1,582 reviews83 followers
October 1, 2017
This fun Halloween book set me off laughing (several times).

Halloween always gets ruined by the Herdmans. This year, trick or treating gets canceled by the mayor – no Halloween! Can the Herdmans ruin Halloween any more than that? Well, maybe. Just maybe they can.

Indeed, it's a comical read – kids will just eat it up.
Profile Image for Betsy.
535 reviews
June 16, 2022
This was another good book in the Herdmans trilogy! I love how the author narrates as an observant child character - Beth sounds exactly like how some of my kids sound when telling me what their classmates are doing (lol!) It would be so nice for elementary teachers to have a whole series of the Herdmans accidentally "ruining" (ie, making better) all of the holidays!
2,367 reviews31 followers
October 27, 2011
Last evening I was reading a teacher site I sometimes frequent. There someone asked about this book. Someone else provided a very detailed project packet, which I downloaded. I made plans to run out at lunchtime to get the one copy Cumberland County has. Upon entering school, I thought to check our school library, just in case. Sure enough, we have a copy and no one had checked it out two days before we celebrate.

I have read The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. It's a very fine tale. This sequel, written 30+ years later, pales in comparison.

Oh, there is some zaniness here. Frankly, the build-up is quite good. All is set up for a classic perfect ending as one might expect from the Christmas tale. But that's the thing, Christmas has that emotional connection tied to the holiday—the meaning. That was the hook in the Christmas story. Early on in this book I thought of that. Halloween doesn't have that spiritual angle to play. And sure enough, this falls flat due to the fact that there is nothing uplifting for the Herdmans to have learned from the episodes here.

Yes, they mess everything up again. And in a convoluted manner, it all works out. But there isn't the Linus moment, as it were, where we (and they) gain inspiration because of it. Without that, the book is severely lacking.

Fun, yes. Compelling, no.
Profile Image for Jess.
377 reviews
September 29, 2012
I was excited to see this book on the shelf as a sequel to one of my favorite kids books-(Best Christmas Pageant Ever) involving my favorite holiday
It was a quick read but not a very fulling one. This was written 30 years after the original and it was unclear of what time period it was set. I'm assuming its the same "present day" setting because these children have very few similarities with kids of today.
It was very chaotic and I didn't understand the conclusion. I agree with other reviews saying this book lacked the heart of the original.
(And seriously, in this whole school not one kid can stand up to the Herdmans? Perhaps this is the reason for the idealistic setting- In the modern day, kids would be probably taking swings at the Herdman clan and some one would have sense enough to call CPS on the dead beat mother)
Profile Image for John.
784 reviews8 followers
October 9, 2019
Book is good, Elaine Stritch is fantastic. I forgot just how good a reader she is.
21 reviews
July 27, 2008
I like it because Alice dressed up like a Christmas tree.
7 reviews1 follower
January 28, 2025
I found a few too many things problematic in this book that I couldn’t overlook. I think this was first published in 2004, so even then, it's pretty unacceptable and didn’t age well. I suppose it’s a good talking point about some of these things with your kids, though!

Problems:
-Threats of “something happening at the school” shouldn’t be taken lightly!!
-Are there no consequences for the actions of the Herdman children on a community level? I’m thinking arson, etc. And also, clearly there are some issues going on at home. Does no one help them?
-Why should an entire town change Halloween based on the behavior of one family? And conversely, one family should not be excluded from festivities either! Wrong and wrong.
-One student is called fat and talks about being sent to fat camp
-the welfare/donut thing

This book is just not as good as the others. One extra star because the dialogue between the kids is always cute, and my kids thought it was funny.
Profile Image for Kristen.
945 reviews
September 29, 2024
9/28/2024 - Cute story and I would read it again to my daughter. This is my first time reading a story from this series. I honestly thought it was written 60+ years ago because the phrasing and sentence structure were so awkward at times.
Profile Image for Bethanyanne.
228 reviews2 followers
October 23, 2024
Not my favorite Herdman book but my kids still loved it.
Profile Image for John Doyle.
Author 2 books24 followers
July 8, 2025
Nothing like stale candy that never goes completely bad!
Profile Image for Danielle Palmer.
1,097 reviews15 followers
Read
October 10, 2023
DNF. As many reviews are noting, doesn’t hold a candle to the Christmas one.
Profile Image for The Dusty Jacket.
316 reviews30 followers
August 25, 2025
Well, one thing’s for sure and that’s if there is no Halloween this year, you can blame the Herdmans! After ruining past Halloweens, not to mention sabotaging Arbor and Flag Day, it comes as no surprise when the mayor announces that Halloween will be held inside Woodrow Wilson School this year. Yes, everyone deserves a safe and controlled Halloween and without the Herdmans, the school will definitely be the safest place to be on Halloween…or will it?

The Best Halloween Ever is the third and final installment in Barbara Robinson’s The Herdman series and gives readers one last chance to delight in the deviously notorious antics of Ralph, Imogene, Leroy, Claude, Ollie, and Gladys Herdman. Despite the town’s fool-proof plans to prevent the Herdmans from tarnishing yet another community event, Imogen and company prove once again how the best-laid plans often go awry. Between mysterious disappearances, a missing playground slide, a sudden power outage, and mistaken identities, the worst Halloween ever quickly turns into the best Halloween ever.

The Best Halloween Ever isn’t just a story about undisciplined kids rebelling against the establishment, it’s an entertaining story of redemption and inclusion while celebrating the joy and thrill that only Halloween brings. Author and diversity consultant Verna Myers once said, “Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance.” While the Herdmans would never be on anyone’s guest list or dance card, how fortunate are those when they show up anyway. Between the chaos and confusion, there might also be a valuable lesson or two learned. By the end of it all, everyone soon realizes that a party truly wouldn't be a party without the Herdmans.
Profile Image for Dolly.
Author 1 book671 followers
November 17, 2012
This book is one of three stories written by Barbara Robinson about a community who is terrorized by a family called The Herdmans.

I had found this book a long time ago and tucked it away in our container of Halloween decorations with a few other Halloween-themed books. I figured that our girls would be old enough to want to read this someday.

This year, we pulled the book out and started reading it. I have to admit, though, that it just didn't seem to engage us. I kept falling asleep as I read it, but the plot isn't too boring, so I must've been tired. In any case, we read no more than a chapter each night and sometimes not even that.

We finally finished the story and it had an entertaining (and humorous) ending. Overall, we enjoyed reading this story together, but I'm not sure if we'll pursue reading other books in this series. (Apparently the first book, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever, was written first, over 30 years ago, and is much more highly acclaimed, so maybe we'll give it a shot.)
Profile Image for Jack Khandjian.
16 reviews1 follower
January 26, 2014

The theme of the book The Worst Holloween Ever is to say that there is always good in somebody. The Herdmans on Halloween have always created a disaster. Every Halloween, the Herdman kids steal candy, spray-paint other kids, and take everything that isn't nailed down. There are six Herdmans and the worst one is the youngest one, And this year the Mayor decides to cancel Halloween, because of the Herdmans. That means there'd be no Herdman trouble to contend with, but that also means no candy, no costumes, and no trick-or-treating, Wich is terrible. The main characters in this book is Charlie, the Herdmans, Beth, Mom, Dad, Allice, Boomer, Mayor, and Mr. Crabtree.

My critique of the book is good. I think the book was funny. The writing is funny, and I really liked the diolauge. I would recomend this book to my friends because we all like funny books. If this book is part of a series I would read it, because I enjoyed reading it and its a quick read.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 451 reviews

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