Courtesy of wikipedia.org
One of the biggest series I remember from my high school days (besides Harry Potter) had to be Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American author Daniel Handler. Surprisingly enough, I didn’t know that until I did research for this post, but hey, you learn something new every day, right?
A Series of Unfortunate Events has 13 books total, detailing the strange lives of Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire after their parents’ death in a house fire started by arson. Their estate executor, Arthur Poe, leaves them with their distant cousin Count Olaf, who regularly plots to take away the kids’ substantial inheritance. In the beginning, he does this by attempting to take Violet as his wife. In other situations, he just tries to kill the kids altogether.
Because I know you’re wondering, yes these attempts go through all 13 books. But the ridiculousness of the situations is what makes it so interesting. In one case, they end up at a relative with thousands of reptiles. In another, they end up at a slightly different version of The Village. They do meet other interesting kids on the way, most notably the Quagmires, who seem to have also been orphaned by a mysterious fire. And as would be expected, there’s a lot of betrayal, mystery, confusion and intense situations.
One thing that would constantly frustrate me is how dumb the adults in this series were. Every adult, except for Olaf, would always put the children in danger. Olaf would be in the most obvious disguise, but none of the adults would notice, even with the kids constantly protesting and trying to convince them. Even with Poe knowing Olaf’s tricks, he would still be incredibly oblivious. Seriously, that’s the one part that drove me nuts. I mean, how would they not know? But, then again, it would’ve ended a lot earlier than it did if Olaf really got caught.
For as long and confusing as this series was, it was great, and I will definitely revisit it in the future. I know that they made a movie of the first three books, but seriously, read the books. The movie was pretty terrible. So, until next time, happy reading!
-Lauren Pirc, Assistant Blog Editor
