With the kid wanting to watch the new Netflix series, it seemed about time to read A Series of Unfortunate Events. I hadn't read it before (I was a little too old when it came out), so this was new for both of us. 
 It markets itself as a dark and depressing story, which it is. Mostly by telling us so. The writing style itself is a little too melodramatic to really be taken seriously, but it works well as a "baby's first gothic" (in the Mysteries of Udolpho sense). 
 The book has a fairly strong narrator, who will break the fourth wall fairly frequently to comment on the story, or to explain what a word means. Sometimes these explanations are great, as when the definition is tailored to the specifics of the situation in which the word was used. Sometimes, though, it's more of a straight definition, which is helpful for my five year old, I guess, but sucks the humour right out of it. On the whole, though, I do enjoy visible narrators, and I found that the interjections were usually quite funny. 
 I like that the children each have a thing to differentiate them - Violet is the inventor, Klaus is the reader, and Sunny likes to bite. But unless the children are actively doing something that fits within their area of interest, they seemed somewhat interchangeable (well, Violet and Klaus, anyway). It'll be interesting to see if they become stronger as the series wears on. 
 As for the plot itself, I'm not quite sure what to make of it. Readers are amply (and strongly!) warned that this series is all about terrible things happening to children, but I didn't think it'd jump right into child brides. Still, it was a legal thing to access their fortunes, fine, but I was reading through a cringe for much of the book, silently chanting to myself "please no wedding night jokes, please no wedding night jokes..." Until, of course, one is made. It's quick, it's in passing, I'm 100% sure that my kid didn't pick up on it, but this kiddie book straight up mentioned child rape, and I'm pretty not comfortable with that. 
 All in all, I didn't find this book to be spectacular. It was entertaining, funny at times, and I can see the gothic imagery being very memorable for younglings.