Where to begin?
The Baudelaire children—Violet, Klaus, and Sunny—suffered a great deal in this book (and in the other twelve twisted tales in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events).
As such, I’m hesitant to say that I enjoyed reading about their misfortunes. Misfortune here being a word which means experiencing misery and woe at the hands of the villainous Count Olaf, who served as the Baudelaire children’s antagonist and adoptive legal guardian after a devastating fire tragically burned their home to the ground and orphaned them as well.
However, Mr. Snicket’s stories did have a profound effect on me during my formative years, so I enjoyed rereading this book, experiencing it all over again as an adult. Rare and wonderful are the books you can read as a kid and still enjoy years later as an adult, and this is one of them.
I appreciate many things about The Bad Beginning:
* Mr. Snicket’s humorous asides, which were some of the first examples that I can remember reading of the storyteller actually addressing me as the reader. Nothing invites me in more as a reader than experiencing that familiarity with the storyteller.
* The Baudelaire children being limited in what they could do as the protagonists because they were children, but still being the heroes of the story in a way that felt as realistic as a book about a villain scheming to steal a fortune from three orphans can be.
*The absolute inability of the adults in the story to do anything to help the Baudelaire children in their plight.
* The implicit (and explicit) message that books can help us, no matter the dire situation we find ourselves in. (Of course, for legal reasons, it should be stated that there are limits to this last one, as a book would be little help if one were falling from a plane without a parachute. But still.)
I think A Series of Unfortunate Events is one of the finest examples of a children’s book series in which the protagonists must use cleverness and the things they’re interested in (in the Baudelaire children’s case, inventing, reading, and biting things—in that order for Violet, Klaus, and Sunny) to overcome the challenges in front of them posed by the antagonists.
As a kid, I never felt that what the Baudelaires were doing was beyond the realm of reality, and that helped make the series feel grounded—even though I knew it was most certainly fiction.
In short, while The Bad Beginning was a miserable start to the Baudelaire orphans’ misfortunes and woes, it is an excellent start to A Series of Unfortunate Events and well worth your time if you haven’t read it yet. (Also, the Netflix series based on the books is incredible.)
Well done, Mr. Snicket. Well done.
Until next time,
Al
