The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket is a gloomy, very funny mystery for 10 year olds, and it arrives late in a long series.<\/p>\n
That matters more here than it usually does. The book opens with Violet, Klaus and Sunny in the back of a stranger’s taxi, and nearly everything they see out of the window is a reference to something that has already happened to them.<\/p>\n
A market. A penthouse at 667 Dark Avenue. A manhole cover over a tunnel they once crawled along. If your reader has met none of that, the first chapter is a list of names.<\/p>\n
The driver is Kit Snicket. She is pregnant, exhausted and talking in riddles about disguises, observations and an important brunch.<\/p>\n
She also spins the taxi through a hedge to shake off whoever is behind them, then admits she probably should not have done that.<\/p>\n
Where she takes them is the best thing in the book. The Hotel Denouement leans towards a pond at exactly the right angle so that the water reflects the building and nothing else, with every sign painted backwards so it only reads correctly in the reflection.<\/p>\n
Lilies grow on the brickwork. Three children standing on the lawn genuinely cannot tell which one is the hotel.<\/p>\n
The voice is why people love these. The narrator keeps stopping to define words for you, usually sarcastically, and keeps advising you to put the book down and go and read something happier.<\/p>\n
He also mentions, quite calmly, that a gun goes off by accident in chapter nine of this very book and kills somebody. That is the author warning you, not me.<\/p>\n
So here is the honest version. The children’s parents died in a fire before the series began, and it is stated plainly on the first page. Somebody dies in this one. Almost every adult lies to them, and a fair bit of the comedy is bleak about how little grown ups help.<\/p>\n
Plenty of children find all that hilarious rather than upsetting, because the jokes genuinely never stop. A child who takes stories to heart may want something lighter afterwards.<\/p>\n
There is also a lot of vocabulary, deliberately. Words like penultimate and denouement are the point, and the narrator explains each one as he goes, so a strong reader gains rather than struggles.<\/p>\n
If your reader is new to all this, start where it starts. That is The Bad Beginning, a grey morning on Briny Beach with a coughing man in a top hat walking out of the fog to tell three children that their house has burned down.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket is a gloomy, very funny mystery for 10 year olds, and it arrives late in a long series. That matters more here than it usually does. The book opens with Violet, Klaus and Sunny in the back of a stranger’s taxi, and nearly everything they see out of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10818,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"lr_next_read_post_id":6699,"lr_next_read_anchor":"The Bad Beginning","lr_seo_hook":"Three orphans go undercover in a hotel built to look like its reflection."},"book_tag":[22],"age_group":[29],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[612],"class_list":["post-6705","our-books","type-our-books","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","book_tag-mystery-books","age_group-books-for-10-year-olds","book_type-paid","book_author-lemony-snicket"],"yoast_title":"A Series of Unfortunate Events – The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Three orphans go undercover in a hotel built to look like its reflection. For ages 10+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n