This series is amazing!!! I love all the books and I've read all of them too! Once you start reading one of these books you can't stop. All of my friends have read this series and they have all come to me and have said that they loved it. I recommend this book!

love the series. a series everyone can read. read all the book in 6th grade. i didnt find the books nor the movie to be scary or even extremely violent

As an adult, it's a little underwhelming. I preferred the movie a lot more. The books are for a much younger audience, and so each one is very short and contains a lot of explanations of vocabulary. Back in my day (when we walked 10 miles barefoot in the snow to school, uphill both ways, doncha know!) we didn't have a bunch of vocabulary explanations, and we either figured out the word from the context or we used our children's dictionary to look it up. Older readers will probably roll their eyes at the brevity and explanations in the book. However, this would be a great book for someone who is a pretty decent reader but is low on vocabulary. I haven't reached this part in the book series yet, but in the movie the "moral of the story" is that no matter how bad things get, the good things are still there and even better for the bad times. That was very comforting to me in a dark time, cheesily enough.

I really like this book. Although parents may dislike some of the weird and dark humor, kids eight and up should be able to enjoy this somber yet funny book.

The book is a bit violent for some, but not too much. For example, parents die, an uncle slaps a boy, ect. I loved the mystery in this series. It's not a crime mystery, like some might think. So if you lf you love a good mystery, this is the book for you. You might like this book if you enjoy Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys and other mystery books.

I read this book when I was about 10. The Baudelaires loss was sad. It was a great book anyway. You can look at my reviews in all thirteen books.

i love the intelligent manner of the books Lemony Snicket is awesome!

The Bad Beginning is the start to arguably one of the best book series in recent memory. Kids often find reading boring, but it is difficult to critique this book given the lack of boring parts. They will be interested, but adults will probably also enjoy and will understand it better. The Bad Beginning is about Count Olaf, a very evil man, and three children, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. The three siblings have recently experienced a house fire that caused both their parents to die. The three are the inheritors of a large fortune from their parents but are not old enough to get it. As a result, they must live with their "cousin" Count Olaf, who intends to get that fortune all to himself and uses a plethora of evil plans to do so. Despite seeming childish, this book is fairly realistic. The characters act realistically and the situations are very well described and seem like they could happen to an unfortunate group of siblings. Throughout the series, for the most part anyway, the three siblings are excellent role models for the children and send good messages, even though Olaf sends his share of bad ones. All the books in the series are incredible and they have humor scattered throughout them as well, although not all the kids will understand it. The books are a must buy as they are not boring yet make sense and are a lot of fun to read.

We're up to the third book now, but I thought I'd post for those considering starting the series. I have a real affection for these books, as well as some concerns. Count Olaf is a truly awful villain, with a habit of murdering each of the orphans' caretakers. Most adults, including their guardian at the bank, Mr. Poe, are kindhearted but ineffectual and emotionally unavailable; the kids are often left to their own devices to save themselves. However, the kids are well-mannered, generous and ingenuitive. They manage to keep their inherent goodness, and stick together, despite exposure to situations that are not innocent. Oh, and there are lots of good vocabulary words with situational definitions. My 8-year-old and I are really enjoying this series, but I wish we'd waited to start it until she was a bit older, like 9 or 10.