A Series of Unfortunate Events – The Grim Grotto

The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket is a gloomy, very funny mystery for 10 year olds that starts with three children adrift on a toboggan and ends up underwater.

What happens

First thing to say. This one lands a long way into the Baudelaires' story. It opens mid-chase, with a friend already lost downstream and a secret organisation the children still can't explain.

The narrator assumes you know all that. If your reader doesn't, they'll be fine for about two pages and then start asking questions.

Violet is nearly fifteen and invents things. Klaus reads everything and remembers it. Sunny has just come out of babyhood, has four very sharp teeth and has taken up cooking.

They're being carried downhill by a stream with a villain somewhere behind them. The toboggan's steering broke going over a waterfall. Violet has nothing in her pockets to build with.

Then a metal eye comes up out of the water. It's a periscope, with a submarine under it, and a voice behind the hatch that wants to know whether they are friend or foe.

Nobody on the toboggan knows the answer to that.

The pleasure of these books is the telling. The narrator opens by explaining the water cycle at length and advising you to go and read about that instead, because what happens here will have you weeping into your pillowcase.

He stops to define words as he goes, in a way that is half helpful and half a joke. He drops in his own miserable little stories about shoe shops. He tells you in chapter one that something dreadful is coming for Sunny.

So the dread is constant and deliberate. Your reader is in on it.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The children's parents died in a fire before the series began and it's referred to plainly here. There's a burnt landscape in chapter one that the children realise they helped set alight, while helping the villain, and they argue about how much of the blame is theirs.

Nobody dies on the page in these opening chapters. The tone is the thing. A child who takes on other people's sadness may find the constant hopelessness heavy going, and the jokes won't undo it.

If they enjoy being told that things are bad and getting worse, they'll be very happy here.

What to read next

The obvious next book is the first one. The Bad Beginning starts on a grey day at Briny Beach with Mr Poe walking out of the mist to tell the three of them something terrible, and everything the narrator hurries past in this one is explained properly there.