A snicket, a snacket

Gotta love a children’s book that quotes from Richard Wright’s Native Son.

Who knows when some slight shock, disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers in our cities toppling?

Appropriate to read on the day that Rosa Parks passes away.

That said, The Penultimate Peril is perhaps not as important a book as Native Son, but it does delve into some weighty topics for a kid’s book. The Lemony Snicket series is worth reading for the sheer love of language and literature, the wicked humor, the tricksy clues dropped on practically every page–and now, it’s worth reading for its inquiries into the nature of heroism, nobility, and responsibility, believe it or not.

I know a few parents who won’t have their kids read these books because they are too dark. This makes no sense to me. Some of the questions that it poses can only be asked in the darkness (TINY spoiler that likely won’t make much sense):

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny wondered about all the things, large and small, that they had done… they wondered if they were still the noble volunteers they wanted to be, or if… it was their destiny to become something else. The Baudelaire twins stood in the same boat as Count Olaf, the notorious villain, and looked out at the sea, where they hoped they could find their noble friends, and wondered what else they could do, and who they might become.

Only one more book to go in a series that I’d rank up there with L’Engle, Lloyd Alexander, Dahl, and other such as a real classic. And hooray for HarperCollins for giving them the presentation they deserve, too–books to keep as keepsakes.