In a starred review, <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">PW called this debut tale in a trilogy starring 11-year-old Eddie Dickens, who is sent away to his mad aunt and uncle's home, "a tongue-in-cheek tale of a hapless youth. Kids who lap up Lemony Snicket's series will take quickly to this tale and clamor for the next." Ages 8-up. <EMPHASIS TYPE=""ITALIC"">(Sept.)

When his parents fall ill, eleven-year-old Eddie is sent to live with his mad great-uncle and -aunt. As he travels by carriage, Eddie encounters a group of second-rate actors and finds himself imprisoned at St. Horrid's Home for Grateful Orphans. Lemony Snicket fans will appreciate this British import's comic take on ghastly situations and its interjectory narrative voice, but the writing is choppy. Spiky drawings illustrate the grotesquerie. Glos.

Better known on this side of the Atlantic for series nonfiction, Ardagh kicks off what promises to be yet another Dickensian farce with this tale of an 11-year-old buffeted by winds of silliness. <p>Better known on this side of the Atlantic for series nonfiction, Ardagh kicks off what promises to be yet another Dickensian farce with this tale of an 11-year-old buffeted by winds of silliness. When Eddie's bedridden parents "turn yellow, go a bit crinkly about the edges, and smell of hot-water bottles," Mad Uncle Jack and Mad Aunt Maud arrive to sweep him off to their mansion, Awful End. Eddie does arrive safely by the end, but only after several quirky adventures, notably a brief stay in St. Horrid's Home for Grateful Orphans, run the aptly named Mr. & Mrs. Cruel-Streak. In overt homage to Edward Gorey and Victoria Chess, Roberts gives the figures in his small, spiky drawings exaggerated proportions and big, staring eyes for a comically gothic look. Neither author nor illustrator strays far from conventions long mapped out by Monty Python and legions of literary imitators; recommend this to fans as a placeholder while they wait for new work from the more creative likes of Sid Fleischman, Eva Ibbotson, Joan Aiken, Lemony Snicket, etc. <i>(Fiction. 10-12)</i></p>

Gr 4-5-Eddie Dickens, 11, is sent to live with Mad Uncle Jack and Mad Aunt Maud. His parents, who suffer from a disease that turns them yellow, crinkly, and smelling of old hot-water bottles, warn him not to be mistaken for a runaway orphan or else hardships will certainly befall him. However, a series of nonsensical adventures involving an actor disguised as a highway robber ensue, and Eddie does indeed end up in St. Horrid's Home for Grateful Orphans. As he plots his getaway, his parents' house catches on fire. They escape, and discover that they are cured. While the setting attempts to evoke the 19th-century England of Charles Dickens, as well as the gallows humor of Roald Dahl and Lemony Snicket, the meandering, nonsensical sentences and relentless asides to readers are tedious and overbearing. The pen-and-ink illustrations bear a faint resemblance to Quentin Blake's work, but are as mediocre as the text. The British-English glossary is amusing, but is the only highlight to be found within the headache-inducing prose.-Farida S. Dowler, formerly at Bellevue Regional Library, WA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.