Good points, Spitfire. Thinking about modern children's stories, Lemony Snicket quite often comments on the narrative and addresses the reader in his 'A Series of Unfortunate Events'. The opening sentences of the first book,
The Bad Beginning, are:
If you are interested in stories with happy endings, you would be better off reading some other book. In this book, not only is there no happy ending, there is no happy beginning and very few happy things in the middle.
On page 2 he uses the word "rickety" and stops to expain what it means:
...occasionally their parents gave them permission to take a rickety trolley - the word "rickety", you probably know, here means "unsteady" or "likely to collapse" - alone to the seashore, where they would spend the day as a sort of vacation as long as they were home for dinner.
In Chapter 2, Lemony Snicket writes:
As I'm sure you know, to be in one's own room, in one's own bed, can often make a bleak situation a little better...
Such asides are a frequent feature of his quirky, playful style.