A Series of Unfortunate Events – The Vile Village

Three orphans get adopted by an entire town in The Vile Village, Lemony Snicket's gloomy, extremely funny mystery for 10 year olds.

What happens

The narrator opens by telling you to stop reading. He recommends a book called The Littlest Elf instead, where a teensy-weensy man has adorable adventures in Fairyland. He keeps this up for the whole book.

That's the joke. He warns you something terrible is coming. He tells you the terrible thing. Then he apologises for having told you.

Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire are sitting in their banker's office reading the paper. Their friends the Quagmires have been kidnapped and the newspaper has got nearly every fact wrong. It calls triplets twins. It calls Count Olaf "Count Omar". It reports a woman as kidnapped when the children watched her leave with him quite willingly.

Then a phone rings and Mr Poe announces that all their problems are solved. A village has volunteered to raise them. The whole village. Three thousand people.

"It's not as if you would be tucked into bed by three thousand people at once," he says, which is not the comfort he thinks it is. Then he hands them a brochure and lets them pick their town.

What makes these such good company is the gap between the children and the adults. Violet invents things. Klaus has read more books than almost anyone his age. Sunny is a baby who says one word and gets a full translation from the narrator. They work everything out well before Mr Poe does, and he still doesn't listen.

Snicket also stops to explain words as he goes. Skittish means nervous. An aphorism, he says, is a small group of words arranged in a certain order because they sound good that way. Your reader will pick up a lot of vocabulary without noticing.

Now the sad part, and it is not hidden. The three children lost their parents in a fire. Their friends lost their parents and a brother in another fire. Every adult who is supposed to keep them safe keeps posting them somewhere worse. All of that is already settled before this book starts rather than sprung on your reader inside it.

Some children find the relentless misery hilarious, because it is played for laughs and the Baudelaires are clever rather than helpless. Some really don't. If yours finds the idea of parents dying hard to sit with, leave this one for a year or two.

One more thing. This is a long way into the series and it assumes you know things. Esmé Squalor was their guardian only a moment ago. The Quagmires wrote a secret in their notebooks and all anyone has of it is three letters.

What to read next

So it is worth going back one first, to The Ersatz Elevator. That is the Baudelaires moving in with the very rich Squalors on Dark Avenue, where the trees blot out the afternoon and the street is dark at three o'clock.