There's a bit of fantasy and magic involved, but a lot of the fun is just watching these two kids working on figuring out the Secret and keeping it away from the bad guys.Īll right: I can't say much more without starting to get into specifics of the plot and giving things away. They're fun and quite geeky, with a lot of random facts and trivia incorporated into them. However, I really got into the series, and ended up reading the next four books over the past few weeks, and I'm glad I did. I read the first book before my interview with Pseudonymous Bosch at Wordstock, and he made the comment to me outside of the interview that, really, as an adult, I didn't necessarily need to read the rest of the books, as they're meant for kids. Middle-schoolers and up probably shouldn't have too much trouble with it. At any rate, the series does traverse some darker waters, so you may want to preview the books before giving them to younger readers. In another book there is a humanoid creature who appears to eat villains, so there are some references to cannibalism (and whether or not it's truly cannibalism if the creature is not really a human himself). For one example (minor spoiler alert): at one point some of the bad guys describe their plan to vacuum out a boy's brain fluids through his nose, hearkening back to the Egyptians' process of mummification. The villains are a bit nastier than Count Olaf. The books are appropriate for middle-grade readers, though I should warn that there is some creepy stuff that happens throughout the series. But despite an obvious debt to Snicket's work, I think Bosch has really made the paranoid narrator voice his own, and the Secret Series turned out to be quite a different kettle of fish (a phrase which here means 'very fun to read'). Both like to tell you what words means, using slightly off-kilter definitions. Both warn you time and again not to continue reading the books (though, I should point out, for somewhat different reasons).

Ok, it's hard not to dwell on the comparisons between Bosch and Snicket - both are intrusive narrators who become prominent characters in the books themselves. It just seemed too familiar: the pseudonymous author who warns you not to read the book, a couple of kids who are up against a mysterious secret society and vast conspiracies. But when the next few books in the series started showing up, with titles like If You're Reading This, It's Too Late and This Book Is Not Good For You, I wondered how similar this series would be to Unfortunate Events. I remember seeing the first book, The Name of This Book Is Secret, in bookstores and being somewhat intrigued. When the first book in the Secret Series by Pseudonymous Bosch was published in 2007, it was shortly after the final book in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, which I had followed from the beginning.

The secret series pseudonymous bosch