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This
companion volume to the Lemony Snicket A Series of
Unfortunate Events book series will delight children
(and adult) fans of the wickedly anti-happily-ever-after
serial. Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography
is bursting its seams with the kind of tongue-in-cheek humor
that its title promises.
This
"unauthorized autobiography" presents a series of
letters, newspaper clippings, score sheets, photographs,
tickets, minutes of a secret meeting, postcards, and the
like, that purport to reveal more about the children's
author, Lemony Snicket. The chapters listed in the table of
contents present a series of questions that readers truly
want answers for (such as, "What is V.F.D?",
"Why Isn't Mr. Poe as Helpful as He Ought to Be?",
and "Why is Lemony Snicket on the Run?) that are
crossed off and signed with the initials L.S. (They simply
are not the "proper questions"). So, the question
"Why does Count Olaf have a tattoo of an eye on his
ankle?" is replaced with "Why has this building
been abandoned?", for example.
The
hardcover copy features a reversible book jacket so that
readers can disguise the "objectionable" book as a
pony book from the "Luckiest Kids in the World"
series. (The paperback, of course, does not boast this
feature).
The book
is very playful and humorous. An example of its silliness
comes from the introduction, where a whole paragraph is
devoted to a description of a woman worded in such a way as
to give us nothing distinctly descriptive. The paragraph
begins like this: "The stranger was a woman, at least
as tall as a small chair and probably as old as someone who
attended nursery school many years ago. She was entirely
dressed in articles of clothing, and had nothing on her feet
except a pair of socks and two shoes." Furthermore,
this woman "began to speak in a voice that reminded me
distinctly of her own." Humor is everywhere, even in
lists of items included in the V.F.D. Disguise Kit
("...suit (black), suit (clown), suit (pinstripe), suit
(sailor), suit (salmon), suit (sweat)...").
This
companion book to the series is best understood if readers
have read up to at least book 7 (The Vile Village) in
the series, but even those only familiar with a few will
certainly enjoy this "autobiography" that raises
more questions than it answers.
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