Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning

“If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.” This is the first thing you read when you open up A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket, a thirteen book series that essentially changed my life. The year was either 2007 or 2008. It’s hard to remember specifics. I was in the third grade at Hildebran Elementary School. I absolutely adored my homeroom. My teacher was Mrs. Raines. She was great, but she wasn’t the best thing about homeroom or the third grade. Jordan was in my homeroom, and if I remember correctly, he was in all of my classes too. Lucky me! Jordan was the cutest boy, my age, at Hildebran and I had the biggest crush on him. He had these gorgeous, chocolatey-brown eyes, that I had fallen in love with at the mere age of eight years old. His hair was also a beautiful, brown color, and his haircut was always the same, falling just a little bit onto his forehead.

I would try to be around him as much as I possibly could. I couldn’t help that I was practically obsessed with him. In class, he would constantly be reading the Lemony Snicket books. I noticed him reading them and one day I asked him about the series. He told me about the three Baudelaire orphans, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny, how their parents were killed in a misfortunate house fire, and how Count Olaf was trying his hardest to steal the Baudelaire fortune from the children. This story of agony and misery sounded so very appealing to my eight year old self, maybe because it was Jordan telling me about it. He sold this depressing series to me, and the next week I started reading The Bad