A Series of Unfortunate Events – The Reptile Room

Lemony Snicket's The Reptile Room is a gleefully gloomy adventure for 10 year olds, narrated by a man who keeps begging you to put the book down.

What happens

The Baudelaire children carry on from where the first book left them. Their parents died in a fire. Their first guardian, Count Olaf, spent his whole time plotting to get at the fortune they will inherit, and although he was caught, he got away.

Now Mr Poe the banker is driving them along the most horrible road in the world to a new relative.

And here is the surprise. The new relative is lovely.

Uncle Monty is a snake scientist. He has baked them a coconut cake. He fills a glass room with reptiles, keeps a library at the end of it, tells them to call him Monty, and announces that all three of them are coming to Peru with him in ten days.

Violet gets to mend the snake traps because she invents things. Klaus gets to read every book about Peru because he reads everything. Sunny, who is a baby, gets to bite a long rope into short pieces, which is her favourite activity in the world.

For about a chapter, these children are happy. It is genuinely moving.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The narrator announces, flatly and early, that Uncle Monty will be dead by the end. He does this on purpose, the way he opens by telling you to read something else instead. But it does mean your reader spends the book waiting, and a child who gets attached to characters will feel that.

Count Olaf also turns up wearing a false beard, and he arrives with a long knife and a joke about a toe that is not really a joke. He is properly menacing here, not just unpleasant.

If your reader enjoys dread, though, this is the good stuff. The fun is entirely in the telling. The narrator interrupts himself to define words, breaks off because he is late for a dinner party, and explains dramatic irony using an example so bleak it is funny.

The children are the other pleasure. They are never stupid and they are never rescued by luck. They work things out between them, and each of them is good at exactly one thing.

What to read next

If they want the story from the start, they will find the very first Unfortunate Events book in the library, beginning on a grey beach with a man in a top hat walking out of the fog towards three children.