Lemony Snicket has packed his wisest truths and funniest quirks into a little book that according to him won’t help on the way of life. The bitterest truth that one must face is the Mr. Snicket isn’t real in the most literal sense of the word but simply the character created, portrayed and used as a pseudonym by Daniel Handler. He discusses everything from what a home is, the matters of the heart and death up to ‘An Overall Feeling Of Doom That One Cannot Ever Escape No Matter What One Does’ a theme that features prominently in his previous works. Snicket features in and also narrates ‘A Unfortunate Series of Events’ a series of 13 children’s novels centring on the tumultuous lives of Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire after their parents death in an arsonous house fire. The children are placed in the custody of their distant relative Count Olaf who’s target it is to steal their inheritance. Their parent’s estate executor Mr. Poe then removes them from his care and Olaf starts hunting them tenaciously with a large cast of shady and maleficent characters. Snicket makes various references to his lost love Beatrice Baudelaire, the children’s mother, and a mysterious organisation called ‘VFD’ to which they both belonged. Coincidentally horseradish, features prominently in the novels, always as a metaphor for all the inconvenient and bitter truths that may seem like nothing of importance but once they are left to air, like the radish, turn bitter and pungent. The series is written in a very distracted and absurd style, never giving any answers and delivering more and more questions. It is dark and mysterious and full of for children challenging vocabulary which are gently explained in a tone of ‘a word which here means…’ a tradition that Snicket has carried into ‘Horseradish’. This is a little book of, as it was aptly named, little truths that everyone needs to face. It includes some of Snicket’s most perceptive comments from his ‘Series’ as well as some new and original thoughts on all factors of life. It is the most useful book if one is for example, flipping frantically through all 13 volumes of the ‘Series’ just to find that one gorgeous quote but can’t remember where it features. However, one does not need to read ‘Horseradish’ to gain a better understanding of the ‘Series’ nor those to understand ‘Horseradish’ they are simply companions and can be applied to each other. This isn’t a book about the Baudelaire’s or his own story, it is a sharp-witted analysis of life, written in absurd metaphors, long words and beautiful prose. The book begins with a short and tragically ironic introductory story about a woman who leaves her house and husband next to the horseradish fields to leave in search for knowledge hoping to find it with the wise man on top of the hill only to find he is indeed not whom she had been seeking. She returns home still seeking only to find that she was never needed. The rest of the book is filled with all the brutally honest erudition she was pursuing so valiantly. Snicket is violently funny and an amazing introduction to serious matters and classics, making him a perfect children’s author as he introduces truths that many might not have considered. Yet adults reading ‘Horseradish’ won’t consider it brain-numbing, quite the opposite in fact as Snicket contrives correlations and absurd metaphors that shed new, startlingly bright light on even the most mundane of matters such as sitting down. Everyone will find at least one ‘truth’ that they find utterly their own, relatable and quotable. If you don’t read this book for its contents, read it to sound analytical and insightfully poetic, in short read to be impressed and to impress.