Baby Talk



The End
A Series of Unfortunate Events - Book the Thirteenth
Lemony Snicket
Harper Collins

When I was a little kid, my mom let me read pretty much anything I wanted. Every other week we'd visit our town's Carnegie Library and come home with at least three or four selections each. By the time I was eleven, I had read most of the interesting stuff in the Children's section and Mrs. Vousden (the best librarian EVER) suggested that it was finally time to "go upstairs" and start reading some more mature material. She started me off gently (or so I thought) and had me check out Pride and Prejudice. When I'd return a book, we didn't discuss it much -- she basically asked me to give her a thumbs up or a thumbs down so she could get a general feel for my likes and dislikes as an "adult" reader. I think my Holocaust period disturbed her. As did my fascination with an author named Dana Fuller Ross. What can I say? I was a weird kid.

Now that I am a full fledged adult, I find it mildly amusing that I spend a great deal of time reading so-called Children's Literature. The End, as the title implies, is the conclusion to a thirteen book series written by Lemony Snicket. Well, not really ... Lemony Snicket is the nom de plume of American author Daniel Handler. In fact, Snicket is not so much a pseudonym as he is a character in the work. From a narrative voice perspective, Snicket reminds me a great deal of the narrator in Robinson Crusoe. I suppose I shouldn't have been surprised then, when in this novel, the Baudelaires found themselves on a deserted island meeting a girl called Friday.

What I love most about these books is that while they are intended for consumption by kids, Handler never ever talks down to his readers. He uses wonderfully unusual words and phrases (schism, penultimate, tangential, etc.) and then goes on to define them in the text. For his more, uh, mature readers, he is also a master of literary, social, and historical allusion. Sunny Baudelaire, the youngest of the three children at the heart of the series, blurts out some fairly odd (but contextually relevant) words that occasionally had me going to Google to uncover the "deeper" meaning. I would kill to have her both her vocabulary and her knowledge of world mythology.

I'm not going to spoil the surprise and give any hints as to how The End ends. Suffice it to say, the conclusion to the Baudelaires travails is not what most readers will expect and I kind of like it that way. A Series of Unfortunate Events gets two thumbs up. Mrs. Vousden would be proud.