The Holy Terror

I was disappointed by this book. A lot of people compare this to A Series of Unfortunate Events, and although I haven't read those books (yes, I know I should) (I've read the first three of them now so I have a better understanding of how the books compare) and I have also seen the movie and I appreciate its darker, twisted humor. This book though, was annoying. The story starts off in a promising way, but I wish I had heeded the author's advice and stopped reading. He goes on and on about not reading the book because the book contains a secret and secrets are hard to keep so don't read this book unless you can keep a secret ... blah blah blah. It was fun for the first few pages then I kept wondering when the story would start. And then throughout the book, he does this over and over, and he says repeatedly how he's not going to finish the book and you should imagine your own ending. This plot device isn't as clever as the author thinks it is; it's jarring and takes you out of the story, interrupting the natural flow of things. In comparison, Lemony Snicket definitely does the interrupting better and nowhere near as often as Bosch. Snicket mostly interjects his opinions at the beginning of the book when he's re-capping and foreshadowing and every now and then at the start of a chapter. Bosch just leaps in whenever he feels like it and destroys the flow of the story. The author also decides not to tell you much about the characters, in case you might figure out who they are. This might be a way for him to get kids to imagine themselves in the story, but I found that it made the characters very flat. I wish the author had spent more time on descriptions and developing the plot than telling me he wasn't going to tell me something. On top of that, this book was edited poorly. There were missing words all over the place, and not intentionally. I would imagine this would frustrate children as well. The footnotes were also a strange idea, and I felt half the time that I was being talked down to - and I'm not even the intended audience!I also found it strange that some of the illustrations didn't match up with the descriptions. One I remember off the top of my head was the picture of the real estate agent's sign which described the woman having a toothy grin. In the illustration her mouth was closed. Why bother with illustrations if they aren't going to match the story? That was very weird, and also lazy.All in all, this was a big disappointment. I was expecting something exciting and funny but it was the exact opposite. I don't know if I'll bother reading the next book, and I'm especially glad that I got this from the library.