For a year or two this Daniel Handler (better known as Lemony Snicket, in his musical moments he’s the accordianist for The Magnetic Fields) work was one of my favorite novels. My love of it may have faded a tiny bit, and it’s certainly not a “great book”, but it remains clever, funny and highly entertaining. So if you’re looking for a black comedy to pick up this weekend, this book is probably still one of the best things out there.
The format allows for all types of games and catty dialogue. It is structured as the day-to-day journal of a teenager written some time after said teenager commits a heinous crime. So you get, simultaneously, an exposition of events and an inner monologue about them. This enables the author to include all sorts of scathing parentheticals about the various players, while also throwing in fun little extras like vocabulary words and study questions at the end of certain entries.
The story deals with the lives of the members of Roewer High School’s Grand Opera Breakfast Club and, in particular, the events leading up to the death of Mr. Adam State. It captures a lot of high school clique behavior with considerable panache, and the murderous heroine is quite the storyteller. In addition, it’s treatment of the TV shows and TV psychologists that are always bemoaning and decrying the latest supposedly negative trend affecting the lives of the young people of the United States are (quite deservedly) torn limb from limb in riotous fashion. So if you are feeling an urge to immerse yourself in a bit of evil fun in a high school setting I think there’s a good chance you’d find this book to be worth your time.
Posted by armand at September 17, 2004 12:05 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Books