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In this holiday installment from the popular Horrible Harry series, narrator Doug is worried about his best friend, Harry. Their classmates in room 3B are excited for the various Winter holidays they celebrate, including Kwanzaa, Three Kings Day, and Korean New Year, but Harry just isn’t himself. He hasn’t done a single horrible thing to anyone, and he’s alarmingly quiet during class. He’s not even interested in Zuzu, the new student from Lebanon. When the class learns that Harry’s great-grandfather is in a nursing home, however, they plan a special visit, and by the time Secret Santa rolls around, Harry is up to his old tricks once more.

What I like most about this chapter book is that it’s one of the few holiday titles that is truly appropriate to share in a public school or public library setting. Many children’s holiday books focus on just one of the major December holidays – Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, and New Year’s Day – thus always leaving out those who don’t participate in that particular celebration. This book, which already includes a cast of refreshingly diverse characters, takes a much more inclusive approach, allowing the characters’ previously established cultural identities to dictate which holidays will be discussed. As it turns out, Christmas (which is, admittedly, still basically presented as the “default” celebration), takes a back seat, allowing the reader to explore celebrations such as Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, Three Kings Day, and Korean New Year. Each holiday gets its own chapter, and within those chapters, there are short lessons, breaking down for the reader the basics of how a given holiday is observed. These sections do sometimes interrupt the story, taking the reader out of the action and into a more didactic, textbook-like writing style, but they provide accurate and age-appropriate explanations for the ways different cultures celebrate their Winter holidays.

Fans of the series, especially, will also find themselves drawn into Doug’s concerns for Harry. Though Doug has proven time and again that Harry isn’t always so horrible, readers of the series know of Harry’s antics and will empathize greatly with Doug’s desire to see that interesting, if disgusting behavior return. The suspense about why Harry is in such a daze doesn’t last long enough in my opinion, and I wished for more interaction and plot development surrounding his strange new behavior, but the author’s decision to focus on the great-grandfather’s new home in the nursing home also worked well, especially when it comes to considering ways to reach out during the holiday giving season.

Horrible Harry and the Holidaze will resonate best with die-hard Horrible Harry fans. I think it also has a place in classrooms where kids celebrate a variety of holidays and teachers want to make sure not to give preference to just one.

I borrowed Horrible Harry and the Holidaze from my local public library.