After all this time (and all these books) there is not much new I can say about the three protagonists. Violet is the same, always trying to do her best to protect her siblings, Klaus celebrates his 13th birthday in a prison cell, and Sunny — well, at least Sunny, being the youngest, gets to change the most, as she’s still into the growing phase. To my delight she is starting to actually articulate words (even two at a time!), getting it right on about a third of the time, which, of course, is an improvement. Not only that but she also managed to take her first steps! A thing that has delighted me given that Sunny is my favorite character and I can’t wait to see how she’ll turn out when she’ll grow up :) An interesting character introduced in this book is Jacques Snicket, “the brother of a man who —“. I am of course very curious both about him and about his brother, that I’m guessing it’s the very author, but unfortunately this will have to wait until at least the next book (hee hee, all the more reason to read it :P)

This is the seventh book in a series of thirteen and I am glad to see that not only the author manages to keep up my interest in the fate of the three children (actually five if we count the two triplets), but he also makes the mystery surrounding them deeper and deeper. Finishing this installment left me with a lot of questions: to the ones I had until now, “What is VFD and how is it related to the death of the Baudelaire parents?” and “What is the sad story of the author and of his dear departed Beatrice?”, I have now added another, “How is Jerome related to the author and how did he ended up with his tattoo?”. Oh well, I bet all these will be answered in the next six books (and my secret hope is that all the five children will get to live happily ever after, although it’s a strange thing to hope for with such series :) ).

As usual, here’s the opening quote, warning the reader that this is a gloomy book that would be best put down (I seem to be sort of collecting them in my reviews):

[...] if you insist on reading this book instead of something more cheerful, you will most certainly find yourself moaning in despair instead of wriggling in delight, so if you have any sense at all you will put this book down and pick up another one [...] instead of reading this book and moaning over the terrible things that happened to the three Baudelaire orphans in the village where I am now typing these very words. The misery, woe, and treachery contained in the pages of this book are so dreadful that it is important that you don’t read any more of it than you already have.

And another quote that I have found amusing, and that, perhaps, illustrates one of my favorite aspects of the series — the writing style:

A huge cloud of dust is not a beautiful thing to look at. Very few painters have done portraits of huge clouds of dust or included them in their landscapes or still lifes. Film directors rarely choose huge clouds of dust to play the lead roles in romantic comedies, and as far as my research has shown, a huge cloud of dust has never placed higher than twenty-fifth in a beauty pageant.

What I liked most: The enigma presented by Isadora’s poems, of course. I’m always in for a good mystery and if it’s in rhymes so much the better :P

What I liked least: While at first I loved the fact that the author explained the difficult words to his readers (English is my second language and, although I do know many difficult words, every now and then I ran into a word I was glad to have explained), I think that lately this habit has gotten a bit too particular: instead of giving the actual sense of the word/expression, the author chooses to rephrase them in the actual context. To give but two examples, “But Hector did not rise to the occasion, a phrase which here means “continued to sit in his folding chair with his eyes cast downward,”” and “Violet said indignantly, a word which here means “in defense of an innocent baby.”“. I really preferred being given the absolute sense of the word (as for example indignant = angered by something unjust) rather than the one relative to that particular circumstance. Not that this bothers me that much — after all we’re talking about a story not about a vocabulary book :)

Recommend it? Of course (understandable enough since I am quite a fan of the series — at my age!)

This book is a sequel to:
The Bad Beginning
The Reptile Room
The Wide Window
The Miserable Mill
The Austere Academy
The Ersatz Elevator

This book is followed by:
The Hostile Hospital
The Carnivorous Carnival
The Slippery Slope
The Grim Grotto
The Penultimate Peril
The End

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