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you know, for kids?
A Series of Unfortunate Events (HarperCollins/HarperChildrens):
Overall, the series is really wonderful in many ways. It's quite well written, the characters are vivid and engaging, and the stories are relentlessly interesting; whether you're young or old, you'll be drawn into the tales of the Baudelaire children and all that they endure. Despite that, I do have a few problems with the series. I suspect that some of these problems are due to my age--although I think that I'd have had some of the same problems when I was the target audience's age. One of the most persistent and annoying problems with the series as a whole is that Mr Poe, the banker responsible for the care of the Baudelaire children, is stupid. Repeatedly and boneheadedly stooopid. After two or three of these adventures, he MUST know that these children are in danger, and yet he repeatedly poo-poohs it, dismisses it, ignores the children when they say that something is happening--despite the fact that they've repeatedly been proven correct---and by doing all this places them back into danger. Now, this is a very adult perspective, but even in days of auld--perhaps especially in days of auld--you didn't become a high-level executive in a bank and display repeated stupidity, at least not that frequently and seriusly. Even leaving that aside, after a kid has been proven right repeatedly, most adults will at least pretend to pay attention to what they say. Another, more serious, objection concerns the levels and type of violence aimed at the Baudelaire children. According to the author, the ultimate plan is to have 13 books in the series, and I honestly don't understand how he's going to manage it. By the end of those books, if things continue at their current pace, the children will have seen a truly staggering number of corpses (well, how many dead bodies have you seen? and relatives' funerals don't count), and watched several murders in the process of making those corpses. (They've seen at least three murders in front of their faces so far.) The violence in the first book is, in many ways, the most difficult to read. There is a rather startling amount of actual physical abuse, and in one passage, one of the villains threatens a child with what almost scans as a sexual threat. Granted, this may be an adult perspective being brought to bear on a text intended for younger readers; they may read no such thing into it. But the difficulty with "The Bad Beginning" is that the violence aimed at the children is entirely too realistic and too intense and (given the rather odd situation) too easy to take at face value. After that rough start, the books moderate into the sort of over-the-top gruesomeness that would actually appeal to its audience without scaring them (allowing, of course, for the astounding number of bodies strewn along the way), but at that point, you won't really understand what's going on unless you've read A Bad Beginning. (In a tribute to their odd structure, the later books can be read almost on their own, or out of sequence ... as long as you've read the first book to understand why these children are actually in this horribly untenable situation. To be honest, it strikes me that "A Series of Unfortunate Events" is in some ways a set of books without a natural audience (although thankfully for the author, the audience it's found doesn't agree). I would never EVER recommend the first book for the target audience; I can't imagine that, if they read it through, most parents would want their ten year olds reading it. The teenagers who might actually appreciate it probably couldn't be convinced to read it, and most adults, who really would seem to be the proper audience, can't be bothered to read children's books. All that said: if you're a grown-up, buy them. Read them. Despite the fact that they're children's books, they're well written enough that any adult will enjoy them. As for children ... use your best judgement.
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© 2001 Iain Jackson, after-words.org
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