A Series of Unfortunate Events – The Bad Beginning

Lemony Snicket's The Bad Beginning is a gloomy, very funny mystery for 10 year olds that warns you on the first page it does not go well.

What happens

The three Baudelaire children are at Briny Beach on a grey morning because grey mornings mean the beach is empty. Violet is fourteen and skipping stones while she designs something in her head. Klaus is twelve and poking about in a rock pool. Sunny is a baby and is biting whatever she can reach.

A tall square shape comes towards them through the mist. It turns out to be Mr Poe from the bank, who has never called them "my dears" before.

Their parents have died in a fire. The house has burned to the ground with everything in it.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

It is not a twist and there is no build-up to soften it. Mr Poe delivers the news badly, then explains what "perished" means, which the children already know.

What follows is the part that makes this book what it is. Mr Poe hands them to a distant relative called Count Olaf, who lives in a filthy house with an eye carved into the front door and the same eye tattooed on his ankle. Within a minute of meeting them he has asked whether he can spend some of their money on doing the place up. Olaf wants the fortune their parents left and he is prepared to be very unpleasant about it.

The voice is what your reader will either love or bounce off. Snicket keeps stopping to define words, to say he wishes he did not have to tell you this, and to suggest you put the book down and read something happier. It is deadpan and it is done completely straight, and once a child gets the joke they usually want all of them.

So this one is definitely not for a child who is already anxious about something happening to their own parents, because the book does not pretend it will be all right. Nobody is coming to rescue them and the adults who could help are useless rather than wicked.

For a child who likes being told that the news is bad and finds that funny rather than frightening, it is a treat. The three of them are clever, kind to each other and very good company.

What to read next

And if the gloom turns out to be the fun of it, The Reptile Room is in the library too. It opens on a road that runs past a horseradish factory and ends at a house with the hedges clipped into snakes.