Lemony Snicket

My mother taught me that if you can't say anything nice, you shouldn't say it, which here means that I should poke myself in the eyes with sharp objects, hindering me from saying anything about The Series of Unfortunate Events and also preventing me from having to read the 7th and 8th books tonight.

Children love these books.

I fail to see why. Nothing really happens, or rather, the same thing happens over and over. The children get placed with a somewhat decent guardian. Things go bad. Count Olaf shows up. Things get worse. They improve slightly. The children move on. It is not the plot to which I object so much as the style of writing. It is overly precious, and assumes that we are idiots and want three words defined for us on every page. Even my 4th grader admitted that the first chapters were especially hard to get through.

These are also horribly bound and fall apart constantly. Thanks, Scholastic.

Children do love these. They are different. They are a nice, long series. There is a movie.

I am not looking forward to reading any more of these!