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A Series of Unfortunate Events
Lemony Snicket and Brett Helquist
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"I guess stupidly, I got these books and have made my way almost 2/3 of the way through the series, reading them as sort of nighttime, to-bed reading, putting someone else to sleep because of the movie, A Series of Unfortunate Events.
They're about how these kids struggle a whole bunch of almost catastrophically bad luck situations, I guess, when their parents are killed in the beginning. That is pretty catastrophic. How they struggle through them and yet maintain their sort of not exactly a — well, yeah, I suppose their joie de vivre actually would be an accurate way of putting it. It's also of course about the villain, this Count Olaf, who continually tries to come after them and get their inheritance. In a growing way — and this is the little subthread that keeps you intrigued among others to go on to the next book — the author is this fictional character, Lemony Snicket, who's somehow directly involved. Then on the level of the language, these Series of Unfortunate Events book are quite reassuring because he's not afraid to use long sentences, and he's not afraid to enlarge vocabulary explicitly by using a word and then saying, "Which here means," and he doesn't give you a dictionary definition. He sort of enhances the context. The kid probably already figured it out. If the kid didn't, he makes a little commentary on the context that illustrates over and over to children who are reading these books how we go about learning words through getting them out of context, as opposed to hearing a word that sounds unfamiliar and panicking and saying, "Well, I can't understand you 'cause I don’t know what that word means." This is a series of books you can recommend to anyone, from a novice reader who wants to start out and take awhile with that first book and then eventually get to reading the series as he or she gets older, to an adult.
These are clearly a five-star series of books."
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