“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.” So begins Daniel Handler’s wildly popular series of books, Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. His work revives and modernizes the tradition of telling menacing, exciting and ultimately portentous stories to little kids. For as long as we’ve been telling stories to children we have told of witches in candy houses, princes who have been turned into frogs and children held captive by trolls. Handler reminds us why this tradition is so important. And so much fun.