A Series of Unfortunate Events – The Slippery Slope

A Series of Unfortunate Events - The Slippery Slope by Lemony Snicket is a gloomy and very funny adventure for 10 year olds that drops you straight into a runaway caravan.

What happens

This is the tenth book and it starts mid-disaster. Chapter one assumes you already know who everybody is.

Violet and Klaus Baudelaire are hurtling down a mountain road in a caravan with no brakes. The rope joining it to the car in front has just been cut.

Their baby sister Sunny is in that car. So is Count Olaf, who has been after the children's fortune from the start, and his girlfriend Esmé Squalor, who has Sunny on her lap and is cackling about it.

Two problems then. Stop the caravan. Then get up the mountain before Olaf does.

Violet ties her hair back with a ribbon, which is what she does when an invention is coming. She wants a drag chute made of hammocks. She sends Klaus off to the pantry to find anything sticky.

He comes back with a list of about twenty things including molasses, lemon curd, mango chutney, marshmallows and, for reasons nobody in the book can explain, glue.

That is the flavour of the whole series. The children are clever and practical. The adults are either wicked or useless. The danger is real, but it's described so drily that you laugh at it anyway.

The narrator is the other half of the fun. He butts in constantly. He stops to define words mid-sentence. He opens the book by advising you not to read it, on the grounds that it will only leave you lonely and miserable.

Some children think that is the funniest thing they've ever met. Others find it exhausting. Your reader will know inside a chapter.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

The Baudelaires are orphans because a fire destroyed their home and their parents were never found. That is background rather than something that happens here, and it is restated plainly in the opening pages. This book adds a thread of hope that one parent might have survived after all.

A baby is also in the hands of the villains for a long stretch. Nothing graphic happens to her and the dry tone holds it all at arm's length, but the sadness underneath is real and the books never pretend otherwise.

If your child is at a stage where orphaned children and a missing parent would sit heavily, this isn't the moment for it. If they love the idea that every grown-up is hopeless and the children have to fix things themselves, they'll race through the lot.

What to read next

Two more children handed over to a chilly relative turn up in The Wolves of Willoughby Chase. Bonnie is waiting in a snowbound house for her cousin Sylvia when a tall governess in dark glasses turns up a day early, demands to know where her curtsy is, and starts talking about the timetable.