A Series of Unfortunate Events does something not many books pull off.
It’s gloomy and grim and a bit doom-laden, and it’s also very funny.
Three clever orphans, one ridiculous villain in a string of bad disguises, and a narrator who keeps telling you to put the book down before it ruins your life.
If your child has read all thirteen of the Baudelaire books and is now after books like A Series of Unfortunate Events, I’ve got some that will hit the spot.
These have the same deadpan wit, the same shadowy houses, the same plucky kids running rings round useless grown-ups.
I’ve pulled five from our fantasy shelf plus one step up for a reader who wants something a bit more advanced.
So who is this list for? The child who quotes the narrator’s warnings at the dinner table. The one who loved that the Baudelaires were always the cleverest people in the room and the grown-ups never listened. And the reader who likes a shiver and a snigger on the same page (and isn’t remotely put off by a sad ending or a wicked guardian).
If that’s yours, they’ll feel right at home with this lot.
What should books like A Series of Unfortunate Events have?
A few things, really.
A setting with a bit of gloom to it, cobbled streets or a crumbling house or a factory that’s been shut for years.
Humour with a dark edge, the kind that makes you chuckle even while something nasty is happening.
Children who are cleverer than the adults and have to be, because the adults are either absent or dreadful.
A proper mystery (not a predictable puzzle that solves itself).
And, crucially, the menace is hinted at rather than shown, creepy but never gory.
Five books like A Series of Unfortunate Events for 9 to 11 year olds
Curse of the Night Wolf by Paul Stewart
Curse of the Night Wolf
Barnaby Grimes is an errand boy who runs messages across his city day and night and “high-stacks” over the rooftops when the streets get dull, always on the lookout for a mystery to solve.
One night an enormous dog attacks him. He kills it.
And that, it turns out, is not the end of the matter at all.
This is Victorian-gothic and fast, with a witty narrator and a properly eerie thread running through it.
For the child who finished all thirteen and wanted a fourteenth, Barnaby’s voice will feel like old friends.
First in a series, so there’s more once they’re hooked.
Castle of Shadows by Ellen Renner
Castle of Shadows
Charlie finds a scrap of paper that might finally explain why her mother vanished, and from that moment her world changes for good.
With her friend Toby, she has to race against the clock on a dangerous hunt for the truth, through a world of secrets, lies and people who’d rather she stopped asking questions.
There’s a crumbling castle, codes to crack and a heroine who refuses to be managed by the adults around her.
If your child loved watching the Baudelaires outwit Count Olaf, Charlie is cut from the same cloth.
A standalone, with a follow-up if they want to stay in that world.
A Most Peculiar Toy Factory by Alex Bell
A Most Peculiar Toy Factory
Shadows of teddy bears flit across the windows.
Dolls whisper behind shut doors.
Something has gone very wrong at Hoggle’s Happy Toys.
Five years after it closed, the factory reopens, and Tess Pipps lands herself a job there.
On her first day, she and her siblings start to work out exactly what’s lurking inside the walls.
It’s a sinister mystery with a streak of Willy Wonka humour.
Spot on for a reader who likes their scares funny.
A Most Magical Girl by Karen Foxlee
A Most Magical Girl
Annabel Grey is being raised to be a proper young lady in Victorian London, until her mother disappears and she’s packed off to two eccentric aunts.
Suddenly her days are full of potions, flying broomsticks and wizards who eat nothing but crackers.
Before she can decide on the most ladylike way to cope, she’s flung into an urgent quest, pitted against another young witch to rescue the sacred Moreover Wand from the dangerous underworld beneath the city.
Cobbled streets, a missing mum, a heroine well out of her depth. This has that Snicket feel of an ordinary child dropped into something very odd.
The Bootlace Magician by Cassie Beasley
The Bootlace Magician
Micah Tuttle is a magician in training at Circus Mirandus, a place so wondrous you have to believe in it to see it.
He lives and works alongside his guardian, the ancient and powerful Lightbender, surrounded by fire shows, stubborn unicorns and magicians from every corner of the world, and he’s doing everything he can to prove he belongs.
Then a dangerous enemy from the past comes for his new home, and Micah has to unravel the mystery of his own magic, fast.
It’s shadowy and dazzling at once, with an orphan-ish hero and a real villain, which is perfect for Snicket fans.
This follows Circus Mirandus, so start there if your child likes to read in order.
Ready for something darker? One step up
A Secret of Birds & Bone by Kiran Millwood Hargrave
A Secret of Birds & Bone
In an Italian city ravaged by plague, Sofia’s mother carves beautiful keepsakes from the bones of the dead.
One day she doesn’t come home.
Did her work lead her somewhere dangerous?
Sofia and her little brother Ermin are sent to a convent orphanage. They escape with a new friend and their pet crow, and cross the city underground, following clues in bone up to the towers of Siena, they uncover a horrible truth.
This one is more grown-up and more literary, with real peril and a body count the others don’t have.
I’d hand it to a confident older reader who can take a story with genuine stakes, rather than a nervous nine-year-old.
If you want to ease towards it, our piece on books like Skulduggery Pleasant sits in similar funny-but-shadowy territory, a little older, and what to read after Harry Potter has more gothic-leaning fantasy for the same age.
And if they just want more Snicket
Sometimes a child doesn’t want a read-alike, they want the actual thing.
If yours somehow hasn’t reached the end of the Baudelaire saga, or wants to go straight back to the start with The Bad Beginning, we have the whole series on Little Reads.
I put The Bad Beginning at the heart of my round-up of what to read on a rainy weekend afternoon, which is a good place to look if you want a cosy-but-gloomy shelf for a wet Sunday.
Found your gloomy reader’s next obsession?
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