The best thing to come out of the Harry Potter craze (if we can, please, not go so goofy as to think it might be the Harry Potter works themselves), is the increase in sales of other children’s books that are far better. Now, the Lemony Snicket books are a much different creature, and mainly for a slightly different age group (I think), so comparison is difficult. Still..., better. And, the Snicket books, like others (the Artemis Fowl books), are new works that are really riding on the wave of young Mr. Potter, so it’s not as though children are exactly picking up the classics of children’s literature (though I’m led to believe they are doing that as well). Still..., better.
The Series of Unfortunate Events books, which begins, naturally, with ‘The Bad Beginning’, are a series of books that make no bones about what they are. Take a look at the title (of the series or the book) and you may catch on that we aren’t exactly delving into fairy tales here. The book/narrator begins by warning us that nothing good is going to happen in this book. Already, I love it. And, moving into the realm of almost too good to be true, nothing good does happen in the book. There are times when you think something good is just about to happen, but it doesn’t. Truly wonderful.
‘The Bad Beginning’ introduces us to the Baudelaire children. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are not the luckiest children in the world. Violet is a clever girl of fourteen who likes to invent things and is fascinated by the working of gadgets, gears, and all manner of machines. Klaus, an equally clever boy of twelve, is the bookworm of the bunch, and once something catches his fancy, he reads everything he can on the subject. Sunny, is an infant, and she likes to bite things. (Having a toddler who once made a seriously valiant attempt to eat my eyeball, this, oddly, is quite funny)
Our story begins with the Baudelaire children learning that they are now the Baudelaire orphans, their parents having been killed in a fire that also destroyed their home. Now the Baudelaire kids don’t know what is going to happen to them, and are the inheritors of quite a large sum of money.
After a bit of shuffling, the Baudelaire’s find themselves in the house of their new guardian, Count Olaf, a distant relative. Count Olaf, as you may well imagine, is a dastardly sort of chap who is interested only in getting his hands on the Baudelaire fortune. Numerous chores follow, and the Baudelaire’s find it difficult to avoid the Count’s wrath, however they may try to follow his instructions.
Before long, we learn that Olaf has put together a scheme he believes will allow him to gain control of the children’s money, and the children learn of it as well. It looks like Olaf holds all the cards, and there doesn’t seem a way out for the unfortunate Baudelaires.
Can these three children thwart the plans of the sinister Count Olaf? It doesn’t look likely.
If you’ve heard anything about the Lemony Snicket books, you’ve probably heard that during the book, many words are defined for the reader. This is true. In the simplest way of thinking about this, however, this would be something that would simply annoy me. First, even in a children’s book that sort of withdrawal from the book would seem a bit off to me. And second, a word that one knows is potentially beyond the grasp of the intended age group for a book is, in my opinion, a wonderful kick toward getting the child to find out what the word means on their own.
However, this is not precisely what happens in the book. What actually happens is much closer to a parenthetical explanation of the situation, rather than simply a definition of a word. The word will be ‘defined’ by following the use of the word with, “...here meaning X”, where X will be some restatement of the situation in language more suited to the target audience. For example, from page 127 of the book, “...Violet found their situation lamentably deplorable, a phrase which here means, ‘it was not at all enjoyable.’”, which is not exactly a definition.
There are some instances of words being merely defined, but overall the idea behind this ‘defining’ works similar to the above.
‘The Bad Beginning’ is a wonderful story of misery and woe that is sure to delight children everywhere, and keep them on the edge of their seat. It is, however, a story that parents are advised to take the time to whip through first, being that in the hands of the wrong child, this might keep them under their covers instead.
It is written in a very straight-forward, though never simple, style, and its ‘voice’ is one (much like the Artemis Fowl books) that never speaks down to its readers, even with the definitions.
Now, all semi-seriousness about how much I love this book for the fact that nothing good happens in it, let me explain. First, really, nothing good happens in it. The day is not saved. Nothing happens just in the nick of time. There is no knight in shining armor, or equivalent. They don’t all die in the end, or anything, and (as should be obvious even in the face of all this) in the end, they ‘win’, sort of.
The reason I like this fact about the book (aside from my own peculiar twists) is that, in my humble opinion, it is a good lesson in empathy. I like that.
The problem with stories, starting from the first ones we hear and going on through all those we will ever hear, is that we almost always know within the first five minutes (I often think in terms of movies) how things are going to end. The good guys, trying as it might be, are going to win.
The problem with empathy is that you can’t really empathize with someone (or a character) if you know they’re going to be alright in the end. Well, maybe you can in some sense, but it’s a damn sight more difficult. It’s surely beyond the scope of children, or children’s literature, at the very least.
When Lemony Snicket says nothing good is going to happen in this book, he’s really saying something far more interesting, especially to his intended audience. He’s saying that there’s no chance on earth that you’ll guess what’s going to happen next. (There is even a wonderful bit of ‘non-foreshadowing’ going on involving numerous references to pictures of eyes, that seem like foreshadowing, but lead nowhere) That, in a nutshell, is where the brilliance and wonder of reading first began, and now, at an age where that particular hook of reading is perhaps beginning to fall by the wayside, a child can be reintroduced to it.
There is no magic in ‘The Bad Beginning’ to lure kids to it. Ahh..., but there is magic in it.
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