Rating: WARTY!
I came to this as a recommendation from a good friend, but I didn't like it. It started out annoyingly and I immediately began to have mixed feelings about it because there as the potential for a great story, but it was wasted. The audio book is read by Elaine Stritch, of all people, so her voice isn't exactly the best, plus it's hard to see how the narrator - who is a kid in the school - would have had access to all the information he or she imparts in this story, particularly the things which happen behind closed doors when she isn't present!
I'm also not a fan of unremitting bullying, which is what this is full of in the first few pages (or in my case, the first few tracks since it was an audio book). Bullying, unremitting, unpunished, turns me off a book, and so many books about school seem to revolve around unchecked bullying, which makes them completely unrealistic to me. I know this one is forty years old, but still!
Anyway, I haven't written it off yet, but it's right on the borderline right now between acceptable and downright irritating! If the Herdmans had not been so bad, just a bit naughty, and incompetent, or something, it would have improved it, but they were outright bullies, cruel and brutal, and no one ever did anything about it. Their idiotic bullshit towards the end didn't make up for what had gone before, and nothing could improve the ending, which frankly just fizzled out into nothing.
There was a part, when they had the dress rehearsal, and the Herdmans were questioning everything about the nativity story - as everyone should indeed question such a mass of patently fictional claptrap - the book was funny, and I started reversing my opinion and looking forward to the actual pageant, but the pageant never really was a functioning part of this story. How this novel ever came to feature the pageant so prominently in the title when it was such an utter non-event is a mystery to me.
I still plan on watching the movie for comparison. I noticed some reviewers who liked the book didn't like the movie, so maybe I'll have the inverse of their experience! I cannot recommend this novel, though, except to say that it's short. Mercifully short.
I watched the movie based on this book - and it was pretty much exactly the same as the book - but racist, to boot. Even accepting that it was produced in 1983, the movie was obnoxious. It was blatant religious propaganda, and despite this "Joy to the world" bullshit, the entire cast was white apart from two token African Americans and one Asian girl.
That's pretty much par for the course even today, sad to say, but what really struck me as weird, however, was that almost the entire audience for the pageant was female, mostly older women, including a huge number of very mature women. I was thinking, what the hell kind of demographic does this town have when the entire population (at least as represented here), is aging white females? It was just weird. And it wasn't even entertaining or funny. It was simply trite and insulting. If religion had that kind of power, there would be no troubles in the world. Quite obviously it doesn't and it's simply bearing false witness to pretend that it does. I disrecommend both this novel and the movie.
