A Series of Unfortunate Events – The Miserable Mill

The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket is a gloomy and very funny story for 10 year olds about three children who get off a train in a horrible town and are put straight to work.

What happens

Violet is fourteen and invents things. She ties her hair up with a ribbon when she's thinking. Klaus is twelve and has read an enormous amount. Sunny is a baby with four very sharp teeth and a strong interest in biting.

Mr Poe, the banker in charge of them, delivers them to Paltryville and gets straight back on the train. He can't pronounce their new guardian's name and won't let Klaus look at the piece of paper it's written on.

Paltryville has one street. None of the shops have windows. There's an old shoe hanging off the post office flagpole instead of a flag. The lumbermill sign is spelled out in wads of chewed gum.

Then they see the building at the end of the street. It's been painted and shaped to look like an eye, which is exactly what the villain who has been chasing them has tattooed on his ankle. Coincidence, they tell each other. Nobody believes it.

Inside the gate there's an envelope waiting with their name on it. No welcome. Just a map, a dormitory and instructions to report for work in the morning.

What makes it such a good read is the narrator. He opens by explaining that you should put the book down and choose a cheerier one. He keeps stopping to define words for you, which sounds dry and really isn't. He breaks off to tell you about a woman who turned him down in a two hundred page letter that arrived by carrier pigeon.

The children are easy to like too. Faced with a windowless dormitory where somebody has drawn windows on the wall in biro, they talk each other round. There might be interesting machines for Violet. Hard wood for Sunny to bite. Manuals for Klaus to read. You never know.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

This isn't the first book about these three. Their parents died in a fire before the series began, several homes have already gone wrong, and the man after their money has escaped every time. In this one they're children living in a workers' dormitory and doing a job the grown ups say is too hard for adults. Every adult in charge is either useless or unkind, and the narrator promises repeatedly that it gets worse. He isn't joking.

If your reader needs the grown ups in a story to come good, this will wind them up. If they enjoy things being terrible on purpose, the jokes land beautifully and the Baudelaires are never pathetic about it.

What to read next

One thing that helps. Start with The Bad Beginning, which is in the library too. It's the day on the beach when Mr Poe walks out of the fog with the news, and everything about the mill makes more sense once you've read it.