Lemony Snicket's Fortunate Series A Series of Unfortunate Events

These books contain an orphaned bespectacled boy and a despicable villain but it's NOT Harry Potter. The boy's name is Klaus Baudelaire and he is just 1/3 of the three protagonists in the best-selling children's book series "A Series of Unfortunate Events" written by a mysterious figure with a highly unusual name, Lemony Snicket (actually a pseudonym of the real author, Daniel Handler and a peripheral character in the books). The books have rivaled the aforementioned boy wizard's popularity in the children's book shelves. It has sold millions of copies and has recently produced a rather successful film adaptation starring Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep.

It is about three orphaned children, the Baudelaires, who lost their parents in a terrible fire. Violet, 14, is the oldest and she loves inventing things. Klaus, 12, mentioned earlier, is the middle child and the only boy and he loves to read. Sunny is the youngest and a mere toddler. She loves to bite things. After their parents's death, they are placed under the care of the villainous Count Olaf, a very distant relative who wants nothing more than to seize the Baudelaire's sizable inheritance and do away with the oprhans once and for all.

Twelve books have already been published, namely "The Bad Beginning", "The Reptile Room", "The Wide Window", "The Miserable Mill", "The Austere Academy", "The Ersatz Elevator", "The Vile Village", "The Hostile Hospital", "The Carnivorous Carnival", "The Slippery Slope", "The Grim Grotto" and the latest one "The Penultimate Peril". There is also a companion book about the character of "Lemony Snicket" called "Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography". The thirtheenth (and final) book of the series will be out about a year from now. The first three books served as the basis for the first movie.

Each book is a fantastic, darkly funny adventure, and contains a different scheme to which Count Olaf shows up in a different disguise which the Baudelaires easily see through but all the other adults don't (including their hopelessly clueless and highly incompetent family banker, Mr. Poe). It almost always ends up with a character's death (yes, DEATH!) and Count Olaf's escape. The Baudelaires may survive each adventure unscathed, Count Olaf always escape from the clutches of the authorities to live to scheme and murder another day.

This happens in the first half of the series. In the second half, the formula changes with the slow discovery of a secret organization known as the V.F.D. and a complex mystery surrounding the fire that killed their parents and Count Olaf himself. So now, the children are the ones on the run and putting on disguises meeting and facing different villains every book each one thirteen chapters long. Pretty grim stuff for a book for children.

But Daniel Hand...errrr....I mean.....LEMONY SNICKET's simple prose is so tongue in cheek, it makes all the dark stuff easier to swallow. The books are also gaining some popularity among adults and teenagers too because of its inate intelligence, imagination, sense of humor and it is also jampacked with numerous literary references which give shoutouts to Leo Tolstoy, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, etc. Literature has never been made more fun.

Though it contains no magic, it does not lack wonder. The characters and situations are so larger than life that you really feel that you are in another world entirely. It is also quite subversive but quite educational (the aforementioned literary references being an example).The best part of it all is that this, along with "Harry Potter", will keep the love of reading alive among the young.