A bad review of Lemony Snicket's "The Bad Beginning"

When a relative was asking for suggestions for a birthday present for Sam I mentioned the first Lemony Snicket book ("The Bad Beginning") because I'd seen a lot of enthusiastic comments about the series, so that's what she got him. And so when I finished the previous book I had been reading to Sam and Arthur in the mornings, I moved on to "The Bad Beginning".

I found it really, really hard to take (and repeatedly told Sam and Arthur that), so much so that if not for the fact that my role in its being a gift made me feel obligated to finish it, I would have put it down pretty early on and moved on to something else. It brought to mind all the overly sadistic stuff from the aunts in James and the Giant Peach, and the Dursleys in the Harry Potter books, except much, much worse, and without ever letting up.

James, Harry and the Baudelaire children all have parents who died in horrible accidents, and sadistic relatives who get a big kick out of mistreating them, but with James and Harry, even if they were never able to escape this in any other way they would have been able to get away from it by growing up. The Baudelaire children, on the other hand, are repeatedly told that they don't even have that option, told how much their relative or one of his friends is going to enjoy killing them very soon, though the 14-year-old sister might be able to escape this fate if she would be willing to spend the rest of her life as the relative's sex partner. And the fact that there are three children instead of one means that the villains have the added option of torturing and threatening to kill the baby sister as a method of forcing the older two to collaborate in the plans for their own destruction.

Maybe it just pushes all my wrong buttons, but I didn't see any of it as funny, clever or exciting -- just excruciating.

And here are some responses to people's comments on the above:

In response to the idea that the fact that the three children do survive the events of the book is a "very powerful message", well, they survive due to a rather arbitrary decision, and then their relative tells them no problem, he will still hunt them down and kill them with his "own two hands".

In response to the "kids like gore!" defense, well, some do, some don't. I wouldn't call "The Bad Beginning" gore, either -- more like sustained child abuse with some particularly harrowing touches like, again, an element of sexual predation and also torturing the youngest child to get the older two to go along with what is being done to them.

In response to a person who compared it to Edward Gorey's "A is for Amy, who fell down the stairs...", well, Amy dies falling down the stairs and that's all (except for the matter of providing a rhyme for Basil's being assaulted by bears). You don't experience her doing things like wondering what it would be like to spend the rest of her life sleeping with and otherwise serving her evil relative and then deciding she will have to agree to go along with it in the hope of saving her baby sister, or staying up all night crying with her siblings after the relative knocks her brother to the floor by hitting him in the face, or feeling guilty about having failed her dead parents by being unable to protect her siblings. So I don't think they are very comparable, except for that the illustrations try to copy the Gorey look.

In response to the idea that the books are like satire -- so over the top that some schadenfreude would be all right, well, some of the "oh aren't I clever?" asides from the author are obviously at least intended to be funny, but the rest is written with such a wooden style and so much from the point of the view of the children that it doesn't read like satire to me at all (though no doubt someone reading it out loud could make it come across that way if they really camped it up). As I said above, I think it just pushes all my wrong buttons, having had an abusive father myself. Other people will read it and react differently.

However, after I'd written the original message I did get my schadenfreude after all by looking at the reviews on Amazon and finding a fair number of bad ones mixed among the huge number of raves, some of which complain even more than I did, for example, "THE BAD BEGINNING reminds me more of something someone's dirty-minded old uncle would write while huddled in his basement watching kiddie porn. Ick! I'm off to wash my hands and take this book back to the bookstore."

Oh, and here's another minor complaint: the only two more or less good adult characters are a judge and a banker, whereas the villains include a disabled man and a fat androgynous person, with both of these conditions being portrayed as unsavory in their own right. So yet more stereotypes ...