Lemony Snickets' A Series of Unfortunate Events

Well, instead of doing a single book review I thought I'd do one on the Series of Unfortunate Events series. I read all the books about a year ago, but their impression is still fresh in my memory.

Plot:
3 out of 5
Okay, so here's what I didn't really care for. If Tolkien was all about making sure everthing in his plot was well thought out and that no plot holes ever exsisted, the author of the series, whose name I always forget, is the polar opposite. For example, in the book the Vile Village he introduces a plot device of three letters known as V.F.D. and for several books the Boudelaires try to figure out what V.F.D. stand for. In the end, when the truth is finally revealed in the slippery slope, you realise that it probably had no real meaning until that book. Also, the general macabreness of the book is unsettling and depressing at times. Addmittedly, the orphan's ability to rise above it all make them extrodinary heroes, but even then its too realistic. In real life people seldomly live happily ever after and so also the Boudelaires have no happily ever after, which you want them to haev after experiancing so many ordeals at the hands of Count Olaf and his group. Sidenote, the first five or six books were believible and would get a 4 out of 5, but the last ones were so random and unbelievible that they woudl get 2 out of 5 so that is where the gerneral plot score of 3 came from.

Style:
5 out of 5
Amazing! These books are written in such a style you can't help but smile at. The fact that it's all being told in teh frame tale of Lemony Snickets getting this all to his publisher is halarious as the books progress, and makes the interrupations to teh flow of the plot forgivible. His definition of words and phrases, whether correct or not, are also enjoyible and fun. Nothing more to be said about style otehr than it's amazing. There is nothing like it out there.

Content:
4 out of 5
While the content of the stories are generally exceptible, it is the last book which is unsettling. In the last book, the general theme sends across the message that anyone who follows Christianity is like a dumb sheep who simply follows a person without stopping to think for themselves. The children, in a dramatic reinactment of Eden, must eat of teh fruit of the tree, which contains the knowledge of good and evil beneath it in the form of a library, offered to them by a serpent in orde rto be saved. if it weren;t for this book the content would be higher.

Overall, the series begins great. But as it progresses and it looses some of it's believiblity and gains a morbid form of realism the books digress into a form that didn;t have to be the way it is. But as teh authors warns in the first book, this is not a happy story, and that you should pick up a difffrent one instead. I think you shouldn't lsten to the author, read up to the slippery slope or the grim grotto and than stop. I know no one will do that, but as someone who has read teh series, I woudl do that if I coudl go back in time.

General Rating; 4 out of 5