Yes, yet again I read the book after the movie came out, but at least I haven’t seen the movie. In any case, I think everyone knows by now that Lemony Snicket is a pseudonym for Daniel Handler, and these were his first children’s books.

In the first book (The Bad Beginning), the Baudelaire children become orphans (ones with a trust fund they cannot touch) and are put into the care of a relative named Count Olaf. He’s after their money, and isn’t exactly a model of child-raising behavior.

In the second book (The Reptile Room), the children are put into the care of another relative, a Dr. Montgomery Montgomery, who is a herpetologist. (Hence the title of the book.) Unfortunately, Count Olaf returns, with another plot to get the money.

I didn’t find the first book all that appealing. I mean, the characters are all a single note (Violet likes to invent things, Klaus likes to read, Sunny likes to bite things, Count Olaf is evil, Mr. Poe is clueless) and not terrifically engaging. The narrator (about whom I’m sure more will be revealed in later volumes) is incredibly pedantic and condescending. When he thinks he’s making a joke, in the first book, it’s just not clever or amusing at all. I kept reading the book out of a sense of – well, it’s the reason that people watch car crashes. You can’t watch, and you can’t NOT watch. I expect you’re also supposed to get a sense of schadenfreude from all the awful things that happen to the children, and they are pretty mistreated, I’ll give you that.

No semi-real location is given for the books, and the kids are not described – just telltale markers. I could ignore all that if the black comedy (I mean ‘dark comedy, in which bad things happen and you laugh’, rather than ‘comedy starring a Wayans brother or Chris Rock’) was actually FUNNY. It wasn’t, at least to me, in the first book. His asides like ‘the word ‘rickety’, which, you probably know, here means ‘unsteady’ or ‘likely to fall apart” just didn’t strike me as amusing in this book.

I do understand that the books are meant for middle-grade children, and perhaps they would find this first one less condescending and more amusing, but I didn’t.

The second one, however, I enjoyed a lot more. I think part of this was because there was Dr. Montgomery (Uncle Monty), who was actually somewhat sympathetic. He was, in general, an amusing, interesting, and somewhat rounded character. Handler’s (Snicket’s) asides got a lot funnier, especially when he was explaining what Sunny probably meant in her baby talk. The plot was a little more complex, and there was some Abbott & Costello-like dialogue about who rides in which car. There was even a plot twist that I didn’t guess! I was amazed.

So while the first book wouldn’t convince me to read any more of them, I did (I’d borrowed two of them from Tim, and I had to read both of them), and the second was much better than the first. I’d attribute the difference between the two to Handler’s lack of experience writing for children in the first book. I think he found a little more of his stride in the second book.

I’d cautiously recommend these – as a batch, mind you – to somewhat bloody-minded children between 8 and 14; to older ones who want something lugubrious to race through; and to adults who have a pretty good ability to suspend disbelief. The first book gets a 2.5/5 and the second a 3/5. We’ll see where the rest of the series goes.