The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book 1)
Common Sense Note
The bleak atmosphere of the story keeps readers holding their breath, as will the damsel-on-train-tracks adventure. Periodic gusts of humor, admittedly wicked, allow readers to start breathing again.
Common Sense Review
Reviewed By: Peter Lewis
Snicket successfully negotiates the treacherous waters of gallows humor in this first volume of his Series of Unfortunate Events. Like Edward Gorey, his success is due to the formal, deadpan quality of his fine writing, its understated way with catastrophe. The result is at once grim and sinister and terrifically entertaining.
The book doesn't get by on ghoulishness alone; it needs a story, and it has a good one. Snicket keeps readers off balance: He states flatly that things won't turn out right for the Baudelaires, then holds out some promise, only to snatch it back. As if it isn't bad enough that fate clobbers Violet, Klaus, and Sunny at every turn, the adults they must rely on for security and sanctuary prove either inept or evil. There is nowhere to turn but to themselves.
A ten-year-old could be heard to sigh when yet another disaster befell the children. "Whoa," he sympathized. He also wanted to read the book by himself, as if to control the flow.
The story is enlivened by artwork from Helquist, yet the illustrations are few in number--more would have added a real visual boost to the work. Next in the series comes The Reptile Room and The Wide Window.
From The Book
Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery, and despair. I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.
Plot Summary:
A cliff-hanging adventure wrapped in black--very black--humor marks the arrival of talented new children's writer Lemony Snicket, along with his equally fiendish (and underutilized) illustrator, Brett Helquist. The story follows the grim-fated progress of the recently orphaned Baudelaire children, and their mistreatment at the hands of their abominable uncle, right to the bittersweet, to-be-continued ending.
Rate It!
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ViolenceDecidedly violent imagery--a baby threatened with being dropped from a tower, a boy being struck across the face, and the like. Numerous. Death of parents, having to live with a vicious relative. |
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Social BehaviorThe uncle acts like what he is: the dregs of humanity. |
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