Kids into Books: The Bad Beginning

Author: Lemony Snicket

Illustrator: Brett Helquist

Publisher: Harper Collins, $17.95

Age group: 8-12 years


If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book.

In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.

This is because not very many happy things happened in the lives of the three Baudelaire youngsters.

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were intelligent children, and they were charming, and resourceful, and had pleasant facial features, but they were extremely unlucky, and most everything that happened to them was rife with misfortune, misery and despair.

I'm sorry to tell you this, but that is how the story goes.