11/06 A Series To Devour With Your Turkey....and Kids
LIBRARY DETECTIVE
A Series To Devour With Your Turkey...and Kids
By Stacey Anter
For The Woman’s Page
Well, The End is here. No, it’s not the end of the year (no matter what calendar you’re looking at)! I mean, The End by Lemony Snicket. It’s the 13th and final installment in his Series of Unfortunate Events, and it was appropriately released on Friday the 13th of October. What’s so great about this series? There are quite a few things, I must say.
Kids are absolutely devouring this series and that’s a wonderful thing. Getting kids to read isn’t easy. Especially when the Sony Playstation or X-Box is calling their names. One thing that draws kids to this series is the black humor, the silly and sometimes subtle poke at things like baby babble, boarding schools, and absurd grown ups that don’t bother to listen to children. Lemony Snicket, also known as Daniel Handler, has such a great sense of humor in his writing, black humor, that kids can’t help but eat it up, such as with the verbal translations of Sunny’s words. The reverse psychology wrapped up in the humor also seems to appeal to kids. If there’s anywhere a kid wants to go, it’s where someone tells them not to go. For example, a letter to the reader included in the books announces that the book is quite unpleasant, sometimes begging readers to change their minds and pick up something else that they would much rather enjoy. Now, would you heed these warnings and choose a happier sounding book? Probably not. The kid in you would respond with, “Why shouldn’t I start reading this book?” and all of a sudden, you’re hooked. And this is hard to do for some kids, especially for boys. But the series pulls it off.
Another thing that draws kids into this series is the questions it leaves for the reader to figure out on his or her own, or by waiting until the next book comes out. The biggest question that may or may not ever be answered is “Who is this Beatrice person?” Lemony Snicket mentions Beatrice in all of the books and their dedications, I believe. The dedication from The Bad Beginning reads, “To Beatrice—darling, dearest, dead.” A special “book” called The Beatrice Letters allows you to examine the written letters between Beatrice and Lemony Snicket, as well as a series of individual letters which form an anagram. The author challenges readers to solve little word games in his books. Just take a look at Book the Third, The Wide Window, where Aunt Josephine leaves a clue in a poorly written letter, which is very uncharacteristic for a woman who loves grammar. Needless to say, the intelligent children solve the puzzle and find Aunt Josephine.
Lemony also loves his literary allusions. In Dante’s Divine Comedy, a woman named Beatrice guided Dante through heaven. The Baudelaire family is named after a 19th Century French Poet, Charles Baudelaire, a man who led a life full of unfortunate events. The middle and youngest children are named after a famous Rhode Island couple, Klaus and Sunny (Von Bulow) who found themselves in the news, as Klaus was accused of putting his wife Sunny in a diabetic coma. Mr. Poe, the banker in charge of finding guardians for the Baudelaire children, has two sons, Edgar and Allan. For more of Lemony’s literary allusions, visit the NPR’s A Gruesome Guide to Lemony, at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6253438
If you’re limited on time, the audio books usually do the trick and are quite entertaining. The first five titles are read by the author himself, and the succeeding titles are read by actor extraordinaire Tim Curry who provides the perfect sound for these well written, melodramatic, and humorous stories. Aside from Mr. Curry’s voice as ear candy, (I still can’t resist an accent), you’ll enjoy the appropriately written songs that accompany the audio titles. You can’t go wrong with song titles like “Scream and Run Away,” “Smile! No One Cares How You Feel,” and “Walking My Gargoyle”, And don’t forget lyrics like “How I pray for death to begin, when you play the violin...” These songs by The Gothic Archies, one of Stephen Merritt’s bands, seem to channel the black humor and dreariness of the stories, and the recently released album, The Tragic Treasury, compiles them in full with “Gothic Archieness.” (The Gothic Archies are a tug at the old bubblegum band, The Archies, only they are Goth.)
And in the spirit of Lemony Snicket, don’t visit the website, http://www.lemonysnicket.com/. You shouldn’t watch the Vile Videos, or do the Alarming Activities, or anything else that the website provides for its readers. If you’re curious about the mysterious and elusive author, there is Lemony Snicket’s Unauthorized Autibiography. Now, I’ve got to catch up on the series so I will be fully apprised of the Baudelaire stories and Snicket mysteries when I finally get to The End.
I call myself the Library Detective because I can find the answers to any question you can think of, or at least I can point you in the right direction. To find out more about Lemony Snicket and his Series of Unfortunate Events visit your local library; there are more Library Detectives there, too. Now you can read my previous columns, as I have compiled them in a Blog (http://librarydetective.blogspot.com/ ). If you have any questions or comments, feel free to email me at StaceyAnter at cox.net.
posted by Stacey Anter at 12:46 PM
