What do You think about The Miserable Mill (2000)?
I’m rather disappointed that the film never used this book or any book after as the plot is just as great from here on. So if you’re someone who watched the film first and is now on the books questioning why there are so many just know that things continue with the brilliance.This time the children are not handed into the care of a distant relative, instead their fate has changed. Nevertheless, the past is still chasing them and the children are still dealing with unfortunate events which are following them around in disguise.
—Siobhan
This one took a decided turn to the dark. Not that the story's been all sunshine and rainbows up until this point, but even in the midst of unhappy circumstances, the first three books still managed to be fun, entertaining, and frequently hilarious in a snarky-sarcastic way. This book was just... dark.I think a good bit of what made me so uncomfortable about this one is (view spoiler)[Klaus being hypnotized. In the first three books, there's a feeling of the orphans against the world. They each have their strengths, and they use them to triumph even in the most dire of circumstances. That feeling was lost here, as Count Olaf manages to take Klaus away from his sisters--in mind, if not in body.Violet not having Klaus to depend on and turn to made this story, for the first time, not fun to read. For the first time I was actually left unsure if the orphans would triumph in the end (even though, obviously, I know there are still 9 books to go, so of course they win this round). But the delightful feeling of certainty that the children would work together and outsmart the grownups and defeat Count Olaf wasn't there. (hide spoiler)]
—Julesmarie
Here is a sampling of vocabulary a child will learn when reading this book: finite, wretched, atrocious, paltry, catastrophe, assiduous, diligent, pathetic, optimist, cacophony, askew, psychoneurotically, ocular, backbreaking, perplexing, disentangled, ostentatiously, horrendous, entwined, entangled, grotesque, unnerving, inordinate, irregular, immoderate, disorderly, incredulously, nefarious, dastardly, curtly, heinous, bootless, cahoots, conceivably, absurd, tome, endeavor, scrutinize, breadth, epistemology, ophthalmologically, daunting, contrived, appraisal, ocular, subsequent, requisite, exertion, imperative, expugnation, injurious, efficacious, precarious, methodology, assay, neophytes, and ineffectual. Some words are explained in a fun way by Snicket and others will have the child reaching for the dictionary.Some concepts that are explored in this book: splitting hairs, racked her brain, having the last word, en garde, gum up the works, hair's breadth, you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, the lion's share, and stylistic consistency.There is one grisly death in this book. Also, worker exploitation is a theme. A great lesson in this book is not to pigeonhole yourself. Klaus, the reading genius, has to take a page out of Violet's book and invent something. Violet, the mechanical genius, has to take a page out of Klaus' book and read a complicated tome. The siblings learn that even though they have their special areas of expertise, their abilities are not limited only to those areas.
—Carmen
