A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the First

A Series I’m Finally Beginning

I was in high school when this book was first published. I had recently gotten my first e-mail address through Juno and generally liked reading e-mails from girls more than I did books.

I recall several years later, once the Lemony Snicket books had garnered a following, that my dad and I were staying a hotel for a business trip. Along with the Gideon’s Bible stowed away in the bedside drawer, this particular hotel offered something quite revolutionary—free copies of A Series of Unfortunate Events that guests could borrow in one city and return to the same hotel chain in the next. My dad got into the first story at least, yet still, even when it was free, I never wanted to try it.

Could it have been Snicket’s warnings throughout the tale (and I think even on that back cover) that, “if you like books with happy endings, then you probably won’t want to read this one”? Perhaps. And perhaps it was (at the time at least) that I had been growing up (“coming of age”) and was reading things like The Jungle and A Walk Across America. I was becoming civilized. I didn’t need childish, scary stories.

Well, thankfully my own kids (8 and 10) have now rescued me from such thinking, and we’re able to sit down and listen to this series together on CD, which we picked up from our public library (yes, we still use CDs…and yes, I still e-mail from time to time). Knowing that the books themselves are minimally illustrated, I’m not sure if we’re losing anything by listening to them rather than reading them. Knowing, as we do now however, that at least the first two books have been read and performed by none other than British actor Tim Curry, well, I think everyone’s who’s been reading the books with their eyeballs instead of listening to it with their ears are the ones who are missing out. Tim Curry is amazing.

Plot Summary

The three Baudelaire children—Violet, Klaus, and Sunny—shine as the young heroes of this tale, though sadly, the very beginning describes how they’ve suddenly been orphaned by a house fire while they innocently played alone on the beach. The Executor of their Estate, a banker named Mr. Poe, seeks to honor the dead Baudelaire parents’ wishes by keeping the children with family only, no matter how distant the relation might be. Mr. Poe and the bank will keep the Baudelaire’s immense fortune safe “until Violet comes of age,” and the orphans must now seek to find joy in whatever situation Life might now give them.

Mr. Poe finds one special distant relative, the tall, thin, disgustingly unkempt Count Olaf, to take the children in. Just when the children thought their lives couldn’t get any worse, they do. Olaf treats the children like slaves, smacks Klaus in the face, and devises a wicked scheme in which he might marry 14-year-old Violet and steal the Baudelaire fortune!

Klaus and Violet desperately seek a means of reversing the madness, and find a possible solution in a massive tome about matrimonial law. With the dubious help of Mr. Poe and their neighbor, a judge, the children are able to slowly unmask Count Olaf’s wicked plan, but not in time to catch him—or his troupe of strange and wicked friends.

Initial Impressions of the Series

This book was far more dark and mysterious than I had anticipated, and there were points at which I thought my 10 year old especially would ask that we stop listening to it. Yet we persisted through each disc, with nary a sound from the back seat, and my kids became absorbed in the story as it unfolded. [Well, truth be told, no one liked listening to Tim Curry’s amazingly phlegmy coughs throughout the book, though it made me laugh each time.] I love how my having read to the kids all these years has now translated into their fixation on audio books, and I hope that this will later transition into their own eventual love for reading. Baby steps.

I found a little difficulty in finding points of discussion with the kids from this book, perhaps because it was such a unique format to me, someone who’s read a book or two in his time. One thing I did latch onto after we finished, though, was this constant reminder from Snicket that things were always so bad and unfortunate for the kids, and that seemingly nothing good ever came of it. Well, that’s not entirely true. The children weasel their way out of a number of difficult circumstances, and while the “bad guy” doesn’t get caught in the end, he also doesn’t win—at least in this book.

I used this to describe that, even in our bleakest of situations, there’s usually something we can point to as a blessing. I explained it in terms of COVID and our evacuation from our home overseas, how even despite all the difficulties we’ve faced as a family—truly a series of unfortunate events!—God has seen fit to gives us so many blessings as well. In fact, we almost don’t know what to do with them all!

We really enjoyed this first book and look forward now to finishing The Reptile Room, Book the Second. Tim Curry’s at it again, and—minus the phlegm—we’re loving every minute of it.

©2021 E.T.

Read More in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket:

1. A Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket (1999)
2. The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket (1999)
3. The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket (2000)
4. The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket (2000)
5. The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket (2000)
6. The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket (2001)
7. The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket (2001)
8. The Hostile Hotel by Lemony Snicket (2001)
9. The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket (2002)
10. The Slipper Slope by Lemony Snicket (2003)
11. The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket (2004)
12. The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket (2005)
13. The End by Lemony Snicket (2006)