were allowed/had been allowed

[diamondcutter]

This was the first Halloween that me and Michael and Ryan were allowed to go trick-or-treating without our parents.

Source: Mrs. Patty Is Batty, a children’s novel by Dan Gutman

Do you think it’s best to use the past perfect to rewrite the sentence like this?

This was the first Halloween that me and Michael and Ryan had been allowed to go trick-or-treating without our parents.

 

[GoesStation]

The author is using casual, careless English. A more careful speaker would use the subject pronoun and say "Michael and I". The past perfect would be the grammatically correct tense for the timeline, but it would be the wrong tense for the register of English the speaker is using.

It's very common in American English to see the past simple where a careful writer or speaker would use the past perfect.

 

[Tarheel]

Perhaps:

It was the first Halloween that we were allowed to go trick or treating without our parents.

 

[emsr2d2]

There are three people in your situation. You need to say "Michael, Ryan and I".

 

[Tdol]

There are three people in your situation. You need to say "Michael, Ryan and I".

But you will find many people doing it the way the writer did. Certainly avoid the writer's form in anything formal.

 

[Tarheel]

I used "we" in my sentence for two reasons. One, I figure that context probably tells the reader who is involved. Two, there's less typing that way.