The Fool Monty

Play this song first:

I am just a little too old to have enjoyed these books when they first came out. So a lot of their charm isn’t…..lost on me per se, but it fails me a little. Also, sometimes my life is a little too stressful to deal with books of pure stress, even if that’s kind of the point over all. It’s weird because I can handle all kinds of terrible stuff happening to all kinds of characters, but for some reason the peril of the siblings is too much for me.

That said, this book was read by Tim Curry and so it was great. The previous audiobook version was read by Tim Curry but also included voice acting from the actors on the show and it really didn’t work for me. And the third book involved Daniel Handler reading, and well his voice is a little charmless at times.

So this is the one. It was nice to feel good for the siblings for a short period of time, but the good things that were happening and the stability and fun they were having really turned up the sadness at knowing it was going away. It was a pendulum swing in the opposite direction from the previous book. I haven’t yet watched the episodes related to this book on Netflix, but I think Aasif Mandvi is inspired casting, especially given how he’s played as a kind of older coot of a character in the novel. Anyway, it’s weird to review the 2nd out 11 books from fifteen years ago, but here we are.