Books 34-36

"Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events" by... Lemony Snicket, I guess...

Rather than write what will essentially be the same review 6 times, I'll just group these all together. "6 reviews", I hear you cry, "but there's only 3 books in the title". And you'd be right, but given that they're only about a hundred and fifty pages long, I decided to count two of them as one entry. (There's some spoiler action here for the books, but only minor)

For the first week we were in the new house (about which, more later...), I basically read a Lemony Snicket a day. They are engaging, amazingly well-written novellas that every kid should read or have read to them. They feature words and concepts that might be a little more advanced than munchkins are used to, but these words and ideas are clearly described in context, so that if the text reads - and here's a made-up example - 'he saw the falling rocks and moved with alacrity' it will then go on to say 'which here means "great speed to avoid being crushed into jam"'.

The books centre around the Baudelaire children (Violet, Klaus and Sunny) whose parents are killed in a mysterious fire that also destroys their home. They are sent to live with their nearest (by geography) relative, the odious Count Olaf. Olaf want to get his hands on the marvellous Baudelaire fortune and the children have to stop him. Fortunately, Violet is a mechanical genius, Klaus is an avid reader with an eidetic memory and Sunny (the youngest) has some very sharp teeth and powerful jaws. Between the three of them they manage to concoct a plan to defeat Olaf. Unfortunately, Olaf escapes to turn up in the next book - in disguise - and try again. And so on and so forth. The sequels all follow a similar pattern, with the children surrounded by evil or incompetent adults and forced to rely on each other to thwart Olaf's plans.

I thouroughly enjoyed every one of these books, and now have to get the rest of them so I can find out what happens next!

Four and a half poorly-disguised villains out of five for each of them (with maybe a half-villain less fluctuation here and there)