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Malina Weissman, Presley Smith and Louis Hynes star in Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events. |
The following contains some spoilers for the first season of Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Adaptations of popular and widely beloved stories – especially children's
books – are a tough business. And before I begin, let me be clear: I love
Daniel Handler's Lemony Snicket books. The first of the Baudelaire orphans novels,
A Bad Beginning, appeared in 1999 and the
thirteenth and final book,
The End, was published in 2006.
Collected under the name
A Series of Unfortunate Events,
the novels are credited to "Lemony Snicket" (the books' melancholy narrator
and a slowly emerging character in his own right) and tell the ill-fated
adventures of a trio of young orphans – Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire
– after the untimely death of their parents in a suspicious fire. As the
siblings are shuffled from one incompetent guardian to the next, they
struggle ably against the machinations of the scheming and larger-than-life
Count Olaf, who is intent on gaining control of their parents' fortune.
The Snicket books speak to the innate intelligence
of
their young readers – their moral intelligence most of all – and, in the tradition of Roald
Dahl and
C.S. Lewis, they are as funny as they are exquisitely painful. Telling
stories
of love and loss, spirit and struggle, and refusing to sidestep
moral
ambiguity, the novels mirror, with a deliberately Gothic imagery,
that dangerous time between childhood and maturity as the world
beyond your parents' sheltering love reveals itself. In short, there
is
more moral realism in a single Lemony Snicket novel than in all the
Twilight books put together – and I am thrilled to be able to say that the television adaptation (which premiered on Netflix earlier this month) not only does its source material justice but will appeal to all ages, whether you've read the books or not.