47 pages • 1-hour read
The Best School Year Ever
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Symbols & Motifs
The Herdmans’ Cat
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of animal cruelty.
The Herdman family’s half-wild cat symbolically represents the unruly behavior of the Herdmans themselves, characterizing the children as animalistic. Beth explains that the Herdmans “always [have] animals around,” identifying the family with animals, and then she calls the cat specifically “mean” and “crazy,” echoing her constant criticisms of the Herdman children themselves. She goes on to say that the cat must be walked on a chain because it bites people. Because Mrs. Herdman works a double shift, she “[doesn’t have] much time left over to hang around the house and walk the cat” (8). Similarly, the Herdman children, who are inadequately supervised, both figuratively and literally bite the people around them. The cat is also dirty, as are the Herdman children. When the Herdmans try to wash it at the laundromat, Beth’s father makes a joke about the incident that explicitly ties the Herdman children to the cat and its uncivil behavior, when he says that the newspaper got it right in referring to a “WILD ANIMAL” at the laundromat (25). He does not specify whether he is talking about the cat or the Herdmans; this ambiguity conflates the two. This symbolic identification of the Herdman children with an unruly animal helps to support the text’s theme of The Need for Communal Support Systems for Families.
Imogene’s Blanket
Imogene’s baby blanket functions as a symbol of the hidden good inside Imogene. Imogene’s response to the sixth-grade students’ first attempt to steal Howard’s blanket makes it clear that she has sympathy for Howard and will use any means at her disposal to defend him. She sees how Howard’s attachment to his blanket makes him vulnerable to the torment by other children, and it strikes a chord for her: Imogene herself once had such a blanket, but she has grown out of needing it. She is older and stronger now, and she can hide her gentler, more vulnerable self away from others in order to keep herself safe from their cruelty. Even when she acts to defend Howard, she hides this vulnerable side, pretending that she is merely tired of waiting for Howard to turn purple instead of admitting that she cares about his well-being.
Her later substitution of her own baby blanket for Howard’s when his is lost shows a real generosity of spirit: Imogene is a child who has very little to call her own and has few sources of emotional support, and yet she is willing to give up this important part of her childhood in order to comfort another child. Louella’s refusal to accept that the blanket Howard ends up with is really Imogene’s is typical of the way characters in the story refuse to recognize The Importance of Seeing Beyond the Surface—and yet this incident functions as a turning point for Beth, who does accept the blanket’s real provenance and begins to see Imogene in a new way.
Newspaper Headlines
The newspaper headlines that Beth shares repeatedly throughout the story form a motif that communicates the comically outsized impact the Herdman children have on their community and confirms The Danger of Valuing Order Above Compassion by presenting minor disruptions to the social order as newsworthy. The first headline occurs on Page 25, after the chaos at the laundromat. It is humorous that an incident like this would make it into a newspaper at all, and the humor is compounded by the headline’s factual errors and people’s reactions to these errors. The headline claims that the call to the fire department was anonymous, and Mr. Santoro is irritated that his role in the drama is not made clear. This is ironic, as erroneously calling the fire department about a gas leak on such flimsy evidence is hardly valorous. The headline also claims that customers at the laundromat encountered a “WILD ANIMAL.” Seeing the exploits of the Herdmans in all caps this way communicates what a large impact they have on the community, and although the cat the customers saw was not, in fact, a wild animal, Beth’s father claims that the newspaper “got that part right,” wryly implying that either the Herdman cat or one of the Herdman children—or both—are a “WILD ANIMAL” (25).
This pattern is continued in later headlines—for example, Mrs. Wendleken is outraged at the headlines after the snake incident at the school, because they do not specifically blame Leroy Herdman. It is absurd that a newspaper would bother to print a story about a few teachers and children being momentarily frightened by a dead snake, and it is even more absurd that Mrs. Wendleken would then arrive at the school demanding that a particular child be blamed.
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