The word histeronic nagged me throughout the reading of this novel. One of the characters would speak and even before the exclamation point or the reporting verb I would think: histeronic. But maybe that's just high school. Or Handler's version of high school as high drama. There were other words that bedeviled my reading, too, mainly cute and cheap, like, "Oh, that line was too cute for literature." or "Now that was a cheap laugh."

Cheap, cute and histeronic pretty much sum up how I felt about The Basic Eight. Disappointed ought to be added to the list. I mean the best thing by far about this book, the edition I read anyway, was the Adverbs teaser at the end. If you want to read something good by Daniel Handler, something just this side of everlasting and history-changing, then you should find yourself in front of Adverbs and leave The Basic Eight to its own (plot) devices.

This is, in truth, a 2-star review. I gave it three stars (if anyone cares to know) because the last word of the book is "suffixes" and I just think that is an excellent way to end a novel and is surely the only novel ever to do so.