Lemony Snicket’s The Wide Window is a gloomy comedy for 10 year olds about three children and a guardian who is frightened of her own doormat.<\/p>\n
The Baudelaires arrive at Aunt Josephine’s by taxi, up a very tall hill, and look down at a lake the size of a bad mood. Josephine isn’t really their aunt. She’s their second cousin’s sister-in-law, and this is the third home they’ve been sent to.<\/p>\n
Violet invents things and ties her hair up with a ribbon when she’s thinking hard. Klaus reads and remembers all of it. Sunny is a baby who speaks in shrieks and bites what she can reach.<\/p>\n
Josephine’s house hangs off the side of the cliff on metal stilts like spider legs. She gives the children a tour of everything in it that could kill them. The radiator might explode. The telephone might electrocute you. The sofa could tip over and flatten the lot of them. She will not turn the cooker on, so dinner is cold lime stew and the bread is never toasted.<\/p>\n
She is also an expert on grammar, which she considers the greatest joy in life.<\/p>\n
Then a man with a black eye patch and a peg leg introduces himself in the market as Captain Sham, and the children know at once who he really is. Josephine thinks he’s charming. She points out that Count Olaf has a tattoo on his left ankle, and this man hasn’t got a left ankle, so obviously he can’t be him.<\/p>\n
That is the joke of the whole book and it is a properly infuriating one.<\/p>\n
Reading it is mostly the narrator. He stops to define words for your reader as he goes, some genuinely useful and some entirely silly, and he keeps advising them to put the book down and read something happier instead. Which of course makes them turn the page.<\/p>\n
This one is bleak by design and doesn’t pretend otherwise. The children’s parents are dead before the series begins. A guardian they loved died in an earlier book and they talk about failing to save him. Olaf is after their money and is not remotely funny about it. If your child wants things to come right, this will wind them up. If they enjoy being told that it definitely won’t and reading on anyway, it’s brilliant.<\/p>\n
If you’ve got a reader meeting the Baudelaires for the first time, The Bad Beginning starts the whole run, on a grey beach, with three children and some very bad news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lemony Snicket’s The Wide Window is a gloomy comedy for 10 year olds about three children and a guardian who is frightened of her own doormat. The Baudelaires arrive at Aunt Josephine’s by taxi, up a very tall hill, and look down at a lake the size of a bad mood. Josephine isn’t really their […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":10717,"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 unlucky children and a guardian afraid of her own sofa."},"book_tag":[22],"age_group":[29],"book_type":[1044],"book_author":[612],"class_list":["post-6709","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 Wide Window by Lemony Snicket | Little Reads","yoast_metadesc":"Three unlucky children and a guardian afraid of her own sofa. For ages 10+. 3,000+ books in the Little Reads app. 7-day free trial.","acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n