{"id":1207,"date":"2012-05-06T13:53:21","date_gmt":"2012-05-06T13:53:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/?p=1207"},"modified":"2012-05-08T16:24:39","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T16:24:39","slug":"the-bad-beginning-a-series-of-unfortunate-events-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/?p=1207","title":{"rendered":"The Bad Beginning (A Series of Unfortunate Events, #1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>
\nauthor: Lemony Snicket
\nname: Paul
\naverage rating: 3.71
\nbook published: 1999
\nrating: 3
\nread at: 2012\/05\/04
\ndate added: 2012\/05\/06
\nshelves: childrens, humor, novel
\nreview:
\nOccasionally my forays into young adult or children’s books turn up gems like The Island Of The Blue Dolphin<\/a>, which transcend their target audience and manage universal appeal. Then there are those like Lemony Snicket<\/a>‘s Series Of Unfortunate Events which are clearly, perhaps almost painfully, for<\/em> kids. This isn’t, I suppose, as harsh of an indictment of The Bad Beginning as it sounds, since it’s only doing what it was designed to do. But the frequent vocabulary lessons\u2014in this case meaning in-prose definitions of words that may not be familiar to young readers\u2014can be pretty distracting for an older audience.<\/p>\n

Additionally, this is a wisp of a book in which not terribly much happens: The Baudelaire children\u2014Violent, Klaus and baby Sunny\u2014lose their parents in a fire, are put under the care of their evil uncle, Count Olaf, and try to thwart a plot by Olaf to steal their inheritance. There are a couple of other minor characters here and there, but that’s basically the gist of it. Granted, there are twelve other volumes to the series so between them all I suspect there may be a small handful of more complete novels, but The Bad Beginning seems particularly glib, almost unfinished.<\/p>\n

I will say that Snicket surprised me with the resolution of the central conflict and the characters of the children are all likable and egaging. Plus the gentle dark humor strikes a tone that my ten year-old self would have really enjoyed so overall I can say that it was enough to make me think that at some point I might like to finish the whole series. However, they strike me as the kind of books that one might find in a family bookcase while housesitting for some friends or borrowing a cabin and read through in a sitting on a slow weekend afternoon. They don’t feel like something I want to dedicate a lot of time to tracking down and acquiring.<\/p>\n

from Paul’s bookshelf: read<\/a> \u2014 May 06, 2012 at 05:08AM<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

author: Lemony Snicket name: Paul average rating: 3.71 book published: 1999 rating: 3 read at: 2012\/05\/04 date added: 2012\/05\/06 shelves: childrens, humor, novel review: Occasionally my forays into young adult or children’s books turn up gems like The Island Of The Blue Dolphin, which transcend their target audience and manage universal appeal. Then there are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-goodreads"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1207"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1330,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1207\/revisions\/1330"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/complete.ironsoap.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}