The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I read this book because my then nine year old son, stricken, asked me to read the book so that I might see the horrors (the murder, scheming!) he’d just witnessed. So I told him I would.
Time passed, I forgot, he recovered, slowly, eventually, probably. But as I was fishing in a pile of books to read, searching for my next one, he tapped me on the arm and reminded me, still with that haunted look, that I hadn’t read “The Bad Beginning.”
So I read it. It was cute. The language and sly nods from the narrator, hinting at some horror coming up are what set my kid on edge, are surely what sent my child off the deep end, but they were not much more grisly than a Roald Dahl story. The literary tics were part of the charm of the book and while I don’t know that I’ll be reading any more in the series, I think both my kids, the one who was permanently scarred and the other one, yet to be scarred, will enjoy more in the series. So I’ll now have to report to my son that maybe it wasn’t so bad, it was all in good, gruesome fun, and that I’ll do so as soon as I let him out of the cage we have him suspended in from our thirty foot tower.