Count Olaf is really not Jim Carrey's Count Olaf, which is really neither here nor there, but it's not like I'm going to critically review a kids book as if it were written for adults. I can imagine my 10 year old self would have thought this a 5 star book, so well done. ( )

The Beauledaire children Violent, Klaus and Sonny are orphaned when their parents are killed in a house fire. The children are sent to live with a distant relative, Count Olaf, a money-hungry theater performer who connives to get his hands on the fortune. Children’s book but interesting world-building ( )

So do kids like this book? I liked it but I can't imagine reading something like this to my grandchild. Maybe kids are more sophisticated than I was. It's like Grimm's original fairy tales and I guess I read those when I was young and it didn't freak me out. Still. Not reading it to my grandchild. ( )

I have no idea why this book/series is so popular. I can see, sort of, why children may love it. Many of the books I loved as a kid were no better, and this has brave, clever orphans (boy AND girl), a cute baby sister, mean ugly villains, disbelieving adults, and a horrible house. The only thing it’s missing is a dog.

But this just doesn’t seem well-written to me. The characters are just caricatures. There’s nothing especially clever about the setup or the world the characters are placed in. There are none of the clever observations about human nature or winking humor or enjoyably silly word games that made Rowling’s books so appealing. I suppose some might find the little asides (by the way, that word means _______) funny and were obviously meant in jest, but I found them annoying. And the forced marriage device plot involving a 14 year old child, with the adult characters’ innuendos about how pretty she is and about the marriage night, was just plain disturbing, not to mention the implication that marriage, once committed to, even under duress, is a lifetime trap.

Hardcover version, picked up at a church rummage sale. I ought to put it in the library donation box, but I'm honestly considering dropping it in the recycle bin instead.

I read this for the 2018 Halloween Bingo square Thirteen: any book that relates to bad luck, superstitions, including (but not limited to) black cats, ravens or crows, or the unlucky number 13, either in the title, series, book cover or page count. ( )

Pretty good for a kid's book. Very black and white, in that the bad guys are just utterly awful human beings with no obvious backstory that got them there, and not so great on strategic thinking. But then, the kids need to be able to figure out the plot and stop it, so not too surprising. ( )