By Lemony Snicket
Three orphaned children are sent to live with a greedy distant relative who's scheming to steal their fortune, and the narrator warns you from page one that things only go downhill from here.
Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire are poking around a gray beach when a family friend shows up with terrible news: their parents have died in a fire that burned down the family home. The three are packed off to a distant relative, Count Olaf, a shabby, mean-spirited actor who makes them share one bed, chop firewood, and cook dinner for his ragged theater troupe. Before long it's plain that Olaf doesn't care about the children at all. What he's after is the huge fortune their parents left behind, and he cooks up a genuinely nasty plan to get his hands on it. Nobody comes to help, so the three have only what they're good at: Violet invents, Klaus reads and remembers everything, and Sunny, still a baby, has four unusually sharp teeth.
This is the rare book that hooks a reluctant reader by being mean to them on purpose. Snicket ends almost every chapter on a fresh catastrophe, so a child who swears they hate reading glances up and realizes they've plowed through three of them. A lot of the pull is the narrator, who's dry and funny and keeps insisting the story ends badly, and who stops to define the big words as he uses them so nobody gets lost. The three Baudelaires are sharp too, each one solving trouble with a specific skill, which lets your child feel clever right along with them. And there are twelve more books after this one, all built the same way, so if it takes, you've got months of bedtimes handled.