3 out of 5

What I like about Daniel Handler’s Lemony Snicket persona – besides the main Unfortunate Events and the Questions series – is that it really has developed into a full personality for the author to explore curiosities.  These curiosities have extended to music and several other children’s books, and while they all appropriately belong under the Snicket banner due to their cheeky okayness with the macabre, it’s not Handler’s mug in the author bio section, but another wink and a doff of the cap…  The whole thing is so mired in dark humor that it allows for a lot of leniency with the content in the best of ways.  But the flipside of this is that these one-offs can sometimes feel too much like one-offs.  Combined with the general ‘Why does this exist?’ nature of many kids’ picture books, we wind up with the slightly silly ’13 Words,’ which skews toward weird but hovers back and forth over the line between randomness and linearity to render the reading a little cold.

Conceptually it’s pretty great, a word book about a sad bird who paints ladders and gets a hat and a dog and goat who drive a car and here’s a Kafka book on the table…  The back cover is a perfect summary of the jumble of quirky sad Handler gets kicks writing as Lemony, plainly lining up some of the words featured in the book without any punctuation or indication of emotion, but, like, why are we ‘defining’ ‘cake’ along with ‘despondent?’  Handler did such a good job with vocab buildup in the Events books, it’s strange that he chooses so many regular words as part of his list of 13.

Maira Kalman’s illustrations are a pretty ideal match for the simple setup, though, pleasantly one-dimensional and childish but with enough maturity in some of the details (like that Kafka book) to let you know she’s in on the joke.

The short story and overall narrative style should please followers of the author, but the execution would have felt a bit more intelligent and had Handler shaken up the word choices more inventively.