A review of the whole seriesSooooo....wtf mate...what do I do with my time now? This is a series I never read as a child (for reasons I really can't fathom) and decided to visit now as a 27 year old adult. I guess reading is reading and I can fully, fully admit that I would have no problem reading The Berenstain Bears and the Messy Room a few more times (is this why people have kids?) Anywhoooo...this summer I randomly decided to check out the series at the library and became fixed on it. It is probably the most brilliantly written children's series I have ever read (besides those pesky Berenstain Bear books). Use of LanguageThe way "Lemony Snicket" uses language in these books is just utterly fantastic. One of my favorite scenes was in The Ersatz Elevator when he literally used a red herring as a red herring. As an adult reader it was cumbersome to have words constantly explained in the book but if I was a parent or a teacher reading this to a much younger audience I'm sure it would have been extremely useful. What is totally cool about this book is that I actually learned some new words and thought about literary devices in a whole new way. Everything he did was on purpose and made complete and total sense. Everything just works together in his novels like a perfectly formed puzzle. HonestyThere is just something about children's books that are so brutally honesty. Raise your hand if your parents ever dismissed you because they "lived it already and knew what they were talking about?" Oh my gosh...my dad ignored everything I said as a kid and lectured me about life because he knew better. I'm going to start calling my dad Mr. Poe. There are also these little nuggets of passages that you just go wow over because they are so incredibly true. In The Vile Village there is one line where the Police Chief says something along the lines of "I am the police, the law doesn't apply to me." Removing all political discourse from this...that is quite a statement and has some merit. Plus, the idea that there aren't always going to be happy endings in life. Sometimes bad things happen to good people and you have to make the most out of any situation. Very poignant lesson for kids to discover.HumorThe humor in this series is genius. It's like when you watch a Pixar movie and there are jokes in there that no possible child can find funny but you know the creators put it in there for the adults. That's how I felt reading these books. So many times I was giggling to myself or laughing and thought...no way would a child find this funny. The humor is brilliant though, one of my favorite funny parts was the ambidextrous "freak" in the freak show in The Carnivorous Carnival, because I'm ambidextrous! Which pretty much means I'm a freak because I have two useful hands instead of one....drats. Overall, this series is just too smart for it's own good. I have always looked forward to the day my children could read and discover Harry Potter for the first time and now I can't wait for them to read this series as well. (It means I can read them again!)
This is more like a 4.5 stars rating, but I decided to round it off to 5 stars (damn goodreads for not being able to give half stars!).I really, really loved the writing style. 'Lemony Snicket' is a genius! I loved all the wisdoms hidden between the lines and the wisdoms that weren't hidden but quite obvious. I loved the cross-references and almost all of the characters. The entire series has touched me and changed me. I think, overall, what I loved most about the series was how it dealt with death. Especially in the last book, death was mentioned quite a lot. The lost of loved ones. Even the greatest villains (here, Count Olaf) are touched by death. They feel sorrow, they mourn all those they have lost, and one day, they die themselves.There's a quote from a different book of this series that is very dear to me now and that I can not help but think about after finishing this book. I don't know which of the books it's from, but it goes like this:"We all know that our time in this world is limited, and that eventually all of us will end up underneath some sheet, never to wake up. And yet it is always a surprise when it happens to someone we know. It is like walking up the stairs to your bedroom in the dark, and thinking there is one more stair than there is. Your foot falls down, through the air, and there is a sickly moment of dark surprise as you try and readjust the way you thought of things."The only thing I didn't like about the ending, was that there were a lot of unanswered questions. And sure, most of these you can fill in for yourself, but I would have liked to read a bit more about the mysteries. I wanted some more solving. But overall, this didn't bother me too much, so that's why it's still a 4.5 star rating.
What do You think about The End (2006)?
NOTE: Spoiler alert! (Thanks to Tommy for letting me know)Mediocre and disappointing. For the most part, The Series of Unfortunate Events provides a good set of light reading. Repetitive phrasing, stark imagery and clever descriptions of words gives them the definitive feel of children's books while the plots and dialogues are adequately entertaining for adults. Though the character development is certainly a little thin, the reader still finds themselves deeply attached to Sunny, Violet and Claus and therefore ready to read on to find out their fate.The End was disappointing because the end was no end at all. Of course most novels "end" with the characters continuing on without us - the readers - but "The End" leaves us with the Baudelaires just as we found them: in a boat in the middle of the sea. The only difference between the beginning and the end of the book is the state of the Baudelaires' hearts. At the beginning they are despairing, at the end they are not. They are not happy, mind you, nor particularly hopeful, but they are not in despair.Further, there are developments in the relationships of some of the characters that are simply bizarre. Fiction has every right to take liberties with possibility and to catch us off guard at any moment, but there must still be a sense and an order to things. You cannot conjure love stories out of thin air just because you have two characters dying at once and the love story would make the scene more poignant. There has to be a background, a history, SOME sort of explanation when every prior encounter with the character has contradicted the present moment. Forgive me if that's a little vague, but I do hate spoilers.All in all, the book was a disappointment. A poor tribute to the wit and mystery of the prior books in the series.
—Amy
"This book is the last in A Series of Unfortunate Events, and even if you braved the previous twelve volumes, you probably can't stand such unpleasantries as a fearsome storm, a suspicious beverage, a herd of wild sheep, an enormous bird cage, and a truly haunting secret about the Baudelaire parents."A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS number thirteen is the last in this series, as would be imagined by the title. In this one, the Baudelaire orphans pick up where they left off in The Penultimate Peril
—Swankivy
"No matter how much one reads, the whole story can never be told."I understand why many people despised this ending. After 13 books you'd like to have some answers, even the most useless ones, still we've been given nothing. The attitude of the author frustrated me in the first books but then I got used to it and moreover I already knew I wasn't going to know anything more about VFD or the sugarball or the poisoned dards because I was spoiled by some reviews here on this site which I think helped me to enjoy the book even more. I wasn't expecting more than what I've been given so I'm quite happy about how it ended. Besides when living an actual life you don't have the answers to all of your questions, there will always be secrets that will never have an answer and this is what the author tried to convey. "It is not the whole story, of course, but it is enough. Under the circumstances, it is the best for which you can hope."What can I say? I loved the series and I loved the writing style of Lemony Snicket. Plus I'm not an English native speaker and I've learnt more English idioms and new words from these books than in an entire year of university! (you'd think I'm jocking, I'm really not!)
—Annamaria
