a reread of unfortunate events

overall thoughts

i came back to this expecting to be perhaps mildly amused and nostalgic, but i found out very quickly that the writing was actually quite great the whole time. the iconic word and phrase definitions were there, cheekier than i remembered, and between them there were many good words said about grief and loss and hardship. i'm thrilled that i enjoyed this at age thirty-something without even needing the rose-tinted glasses.

oh and it was fucking heartbreaking, by the way!! someday i might have the words to express how it made me feel through the lens of my own particular childhood trauma, but that's not what this shrine is about. suffice to say that there's a painful but welcome resonance there. the future installments lean a little heavier into despair of the outlandish kind, which is easier to find comical - this one has a particular grime and dinge to it that just wrenches the sensitive soul.

quality quotes

If you have ever lost someone important to you, then you already know how it feels, and if you haven't, you cannot possibly imagine it.

i didn't expect something this true and this simply said right off the bat.

...the worst surroundings in the world can be tolerated if the people in them are interesting and kind.

chalk another one up under True and Simply Said.

But his face still had a bruise on it, so Klaus remained silent.

i don't know. it's a simple line, but it's real and it hurts.

the snicket files

what do we know about the narrator/writer of this terrible tale? a few clues so far...

"In my room, for instance, I have gathered a collection of objects that are important to me, including a dusty accordion on which I can play a few sad songs, a large bundle of notes on the activities of the Baudelaire orphans, and a blurry photograph, taken a very long time ago, of a woman whose name is Beatrice."

i'm not going to document every single shenanigan that Mr. Snicket alludes to being involved in - mostly just the ones about Beatrice, because i can't help but love a man who yearns.

the wider world

these books drop some very interesting worldbuilding tidbits alongside the story, and i intend to collect them, even if they're just incidental. just one for now:

They passed an enormous pile of dirt where the Royal Gardens once stood.

hmm... wonder what that's about. maybe nothing. but as a detail, i like it.

most unfortunate event

i mean, obviously it's losing your parents to a mysterious house fire, but i would like to point out that an attempt at a coerced child marriage is also extremely heinous.

overall thoughts

book two doesn't quite have the oomph of book one, but that doesn't mean it was unenjoyable. it dialed in the humor that persists through the rest of the series and introduces Uncle Monty, who is my favorite of the erstwhile Baudelaire guardians. but i don't have as many quotes noted down, nor juicy details about Mr. Snicket and his beloved Beatrice.

snake facts

The Barbary Chewer, for example, is a snake that must have something in its mouth at all times, otherwise it begins to eat its own mouth.

it's silly. i snorted. :3

There is a pair of snakes who have learned to drive a car so recklessly that they would run you over in the street and never stop to apologize.

i snorted again. i'm a simple person.

a strange suggestion

"You have won this round of the game, but I will return for your fortune, and for your precious skin."

it shouldn't be surprising that this comes out of the mouth of Count Olaf, but it's surprising in every other sense. like sir what the fuck does that mean??

most unfortunate event

the constant references to Uncle Monty's lifeless corpse in front of the children who just lost him as a guardian.

overall thoughts

in this one, we arrive at Damocles Dock on the shores of Lake Lachrymose, known for both its violent hurricanes and flesh-eating leeches. our guardian du jour is Aunt Josephine, a woman whose love of safety precautions is only exceeded by her love of proper grammar.

i remembered this one the most clearly, thanks in part to the 2004 movie and in part because Aunt Josephine's final letter and the twist therein stuck hard in my brain over the years. on the reread i very much appreciated that the narrator calls out these well-intentioned but ultimately untrustworthy adults at every turn.

Mr. Poe was kindhearted, but it is not enough in this world to be kindhearted, particularly if you are responsible for keeping children out of danger.

in hindsight, it's easy to conceptualize these first three books as one long installment, and this is a good wrap-up to this initial arc.

the snicket files

a single juicy tidbit. our narrator says:

I have seen a woman I loved picked up by an enormous eagle and flown to its high mountain nest.

perhaps this is how our beloved Beatrice died? that's what i figured, anyway. imagine my surprise when in the tenth book - no, no, i've said too much. we'll get there.

quality quotes

Stealing, of course, is a crime, and a very impolite thing to do. But like most impolite things, it is excusable under certain circumstances. Stealing is not excusable if, for instance, you are in a museum and you decide that a certain painting would look better in your house, and you simply grab the painting and take it there. But if you were very, very hungry, and you had no way of obtaining money, it might be excusable to grab the painting, take it to your house, and eat it.

reader, i guffawed. i think this is my favorite line in the entire series.

most unfortunate event

Aunt Josephine being pushed to her gruesome death before the childrens' very eyes.

overall thoughts

here's where it starts getting weird, y'all. this fourth installment feels like a quick gasp of air between the starting trilogy and the wild downhill careen that makes up the rest of the series.

instead of being placed with a questionably-distant relative this time, the children are handed over to the Lucky Smells Lumbermill, where they must face the greatest of all evils: capitalism. (oh and also Count Olaf still.)

it's a more Klaus-heavy story this time, which unfortunately means this poor kid is subject to horrors. his glasses break and he's sent to the totally normal optometry office of Dr. Orwell - and returns different.

i fear we are all in the mill

at the Lucky Smells Lumbermill, employees are not paid in cash, not even in company scrip, but in coupons for random services that they still can't afford.

at the Lucky Smells Lumbermill, the employee dormitory has a set of lovely windows. they are drawn in ballpoint pen on blank and otherwise-windowless walls.

at the Lucky Smells Lumbermill, lunch is a stick of chewing gum. to cut costs, used gum has been repurposed to create the lettering on the large sign out front.

at the Lucky Smells Lumbermill, the boss's partner was gifted a beautiful, expansive library to hold the three entire books he owns.

Beatrice and birds

we've been told about a link between Beatrice and eagles already, but here our narrator says that when he asked Beatrice to marry him, she sent him a 200-page novel explaining exactly why, delivered in parts by an entire flock of carrier pigeons. the lady has a thing for birds and i love that for her.

also, for the first time we are told explicitly that Beatrice was aware of Count Olaf, so while he was a stranger to the children when he appeared, it seems he was no stranger to the family...

most unfortunate event

this one's bad, you guys - so bad i can't even pick a single event. because of course, being forced into child slave labor at a lumbermill is heinous. witnessing not one, but two gruesome workplace accidents is also heinous. being piloted against your will by an evil hypnotist is also, if you can believe it, heinous.

overall thoughts

this is where the story hits its stride. we are introduced to so many characters and concepts that will follow out for the rest of the series.

most importantly, in my opinion, this is where we meet the triplets, Duncan and Isadora Quagmire. their third sibling, Quigley, perished along with their parents in a mysterious house fire, leaving the two remaining triplets as the heirs to the Quagmire sapphires. what interesting circumstances...

the Quagmires have hyperfixations like the Baudelaires: Duncan is a reporter and researcher, and Isadora is a poet and writes many rhyming couplets. but their most useful skill is just straight up friendship, which the Baudelaire kids desperately need at this point in their miserable tale. the bonds they all developed throughout the book were unusually heartwarming - but alas, all good things must come to an end...

finally, i'll note here something i only found out while doing a little research - Isadora and Duncan's names are a reference to the dancer Isadora Duncan, whose neck was tragically snapped when her scarf got tangled in the wheels of her automobile - a suitably Snicketine end to her otherwise glamorous life.

scene and setting

we end up this time at Prufrock Prep, which is so comically awful that i'll simply give you an extended quote from the book's wikipedia page.

Vice Principal Nero tells them about the school's odd rules: They are to sleep in a crab-infested, fungus-dripping shack because they have no living guardian to sign a permission slip for them. Additionally, since Sunny is too young to be a student, she will work as Nero's administrative assistant, and they all must attend Nero's nightly terrible violin concerts. Punishments for breaking these rules include being made to eat in the cafeteria with no silverware or hands tied behind one's back and having to purchase candy for Nero and watch him eat it. Sunny will have her silverware removed permanently for working in the administrative building, in which children are not allowed.

the snicket files

oh, our poor, yearning, tormented narrator...

...I dared to approach a woman I had been forbidden to approach for the rest of my life. ... I slipped out to the veranda and gave her the message I'd been trying to give her for fifteen long and lonely years. "Beatrice," I cried ... "Count Olaf is

I cannot go on.

who or what is VFD?

in the final pages of the book, when Isabella and Duncan are snatched up by Olaf's troupe and taken who knows where, they manage to pass on a single clue to their Baudelaire friends: VFD.

so what's VFD, besides the inciting information that sets the rest of the story in motion? at this point, i did not remember. it took a few more books for me to make my guess, and a few more after that until it was confirmed. if you're playing along at home (and still don't want to read the books for some reason), note down your guesses now.

the criminal count

Duncan's research uncovered some of Olaf's previous crimes...

in Verona, Count Olaf was found to have thrown a rich widow off a cliff. in Bangkok, he was arrested for strangling a bishop, but escaped prison in under ten minutes.

most unfortunate event

nine consecutive nights of sleep deprivation and being forced to run in circles for hours on hours.

(the constant bullying by Carmelita Spats is a close second, though.)

overall thoughts

my dearest reader, we have arrived at perhaps my favorite of the series. the vibes are impeccable, the stakes are vertiginous a word which here means, and the plots are beginning to intersect.

in book the sixth, the children are placed with Jerome and Esmé Squalor in the penthouse apartment of 667 Dark Avenue. orphans are in, you see, and Esmé is obsessed with things that are in. stairs are in, and elevators are out, so the children must climb the building's 48-story (or maybe 84-story?) circular staircase to reach their new home. alone. in the dark. and alas, this will not be their most arduous journey on these pages. as we'll all soon find out, the real question is not "is the elevator in?" but rather "what's in the elevator?"

scene and setting

i love the villainous-chic aura of Dark Avenue. in addition to orphans, pinstripes are in - as we are told by the narrator, these are "usually worn by people who are either movie stars or gangsters."

the dark is also in, at least when we first arrive, leading to this description:

Rather than streetlamps, placed at regular intervals along the sidewalk were enormous trees the likes of which the children had never seen before - and which they could scarcely see now. High above a thick and prickly trunk, the branches of the trees drooped down like laundry hung out to dry, spreading their wide, flat leaves out in every direction, like a low, leafy ceiling over the Baudelaire's heads. This ceiling blocked out all the light from above, so even though it was the middle of the afternoon, the street looked as dark as evening - if a bit greener.

the description immediately made me think of magnolia leaves, and the idea of a spreading, haunted overstory of dark magnolia is so Southern Gothic and delicious.

...Beatrice?

to everyone's surprise, Jerome is not truly a stranger to the Baudelaire family. he and the children's late mother go way back!

"Your mother was adventurous, too. You know, she and I were very good friends a ways back. We hiked up Mount Fraught with some friends - gosh, it must have been twenty years ago. Mount Fraught was known for having dangerous animals on it, but your mother wasn't afraid. But then, swooping out of the sky -"

and this, i think, is the first hint that Mrs. Baudelaire and Beatrice are one and the same. even more interesting, as the children make their escape at the end of this book, we learn that there's a tunnel connecting 667 Dark Avenue... to the burned ruins of Baudelaire Mansion.

the Quagmire quandary

oh, my poor sweet little Duncan and Isadora. :c

The word "haunted," I'm sure you know, usually applies to a house, graveyard, or supermarket that has ghosts living in it, but the word can also be used to describe people who have seen and heard such horrible things that they feel as if ghosts are living inside them, haunting their brains and hearts with misery and despair. The Quagmires looked this way, and it broke the Baudelaire hearts to see their friends look so desperately sad.

first of all, did not expect to be slapped in the face by such a perfect description of trauma in the middle of this but okay i guess!! holy shit.

second of all, i am so mad at Violet and Klaus for not taking two minutes to swap information with the triplets instead of cutting them off when they were about to reveal what they knew about VFD. y'all are smarter than this!

quality quote

If you were to take a plastic bag and place it inside a large bowl, and then, using a wooden spoon, stir the bag around and around the bowl, you could use the expression "a mixed bag" to describe what you had in front of you, but you would not be using the expression in the same way I am about to use it now.

a very close runner-up for my favorite quote of the series so far.

we need to talk about the elevator

descending a rope of fancy neckties in the dark for three full hours down an elevator shaft holding a red hot fire poker you plan to save your friends with didn't even rate on the 'most unfortunate event' list, dude.

it's not even the most hysterical thing in the book because Sunny later ascends the elevator shaft USING HER TEETH.

"It's not just the size of her teeth," Violet said, "it's the size of her courage, and the size of her concern for her siblings."

the wider world

in this installment of "inconsequential but bizarre," it's briefly mentioned that Esmé has an appointment with the King of Arizona, whom she refers to as His Arizona Highness.

friends of foes

we all knew that Esmé was bad news, but we should've known who she picked it up from: Esmé's former acting teacher is none other than Count Olaf himself.

she also seems to have personal beef with the family, because at one point she says, "I want to steal from you the way Beatrice stole from me." fascinating.

most unfortunate event

i truly thought that it was going to be a perilous three-hour descent down an elevator shaft only to find your kidnapped and mistreated friends at the bottom - but no, being heartlessly tossed down the same elevator shaft (to your expected death!) by a woman charged with protecting you is even more scarring to the soul, i fear.

overall thoughts

about here is where it crystallized for me that this series is ultimately about the many, many ways in which well-intentioned adults can fail children, over and over.

following an obvious VFD sighting, our dear orphans end up this time in the Village of Fowl Devotees, where people live in the shadow of a massive murder of crows which overtakes different parts of the Village throughout the day. they are being adopted by the Village itself, because all of the adults living in it want to foist their chores upon the children while taking no interest in said children's well-being - as we all know, it takes a village to exploit a child.

the children are tucked away with the local handyman, Hector, under the shade of the Nevermore Tree where the crows roost for the night. Hector is our one adult with a brain cell in this book, and he's quietly defying the increasingly ridiculous orders of the Council of Elders. and more importantly - he's finding rhyming couplets.

a lot of good plot stuff kicks off here, but unlike the previous entry i would not say this is one of the stronger books in the series.

Jacques who?

surprise, you guys - in the Village we meet a man named Jacques Snicket. he's been captured under the assumption that he's Count Olaf, due to his singular eyebrow and his matching ankle tattoo but literally nothing else, and the children are powerless to defend him. he's only able to say that he's a member of a 'volunteer' something before the plot whisks him away to his demise.

so what's with the eye tattoo then? it seems to be more than just Olaf's mark...

(this, reader, is where i guessed what VFD is.)

the daily punctilio

this rag will haunt the orphans for quite some time, and our narrator intimates that it haunted him as well...

I myself fell in love with a wonderful woman who was so charming and intelligent that I trusted that she would be my bride, but there was no way of knowing for sure, and all too soon circumstances changed and she ended up marrying someone else, all because of something she read in The Daily Punctilio.

changes

this is the breaking point of the series, where the entire structure of the books veers hard to the left. we end with the kids still in peril - there's no Mr. Poe making a milquetoast appearance, no island of (forgive the incredibly apt pun) relative safety. the Daily Punctilio has made them out to be murderers. they are officially on the run.

furthermore, the two worst people you know have gotten together. yes, Esmé and Olaf are now boyfriend and girlfriend and it's as heinous as it is theatrical.

Duncan and Isadora have been found and lost again, though this time they at least vanish with Hector in his secret project: the self-sustaining hot air mobile home. they leave us with only a tormented hope and a handful of scraps from their commonplace books.

we end the book as Sunny takes her first steps, and we realize that the Baudelaires, much like the hot air mobile home, must be self-sufficient if they intend on staying safe.

most unfortunate event

spending Klaus's thirteenth birthday locked up in jail under false charges. genuinely almost cried reading that chapter. :c

overall thoughts

jarringly, we pick up right where we left off - the children are fleeing the Village of Fowl Devotees, who believe the Daily Punctilio's false narrative that they killed Count Olaf. alone and on foot, the kids stumble upon the Last Chance General Store before finding another VFD possibility: the Volunteers Fighting Disease.

with nowhere else to go, the Baudelaires do their best to blend in on the volunteer bus. their destination is Heimlich Hospital, which is literally half-finished. most intriguing to the Baudelaires, though, is its library: the Library of Records. i sure do wonder if there are any important files in there...

Southern Gothic vibes

more people need to write about the desolation of kudzu.

Heimlich Hospital is gone now, and will probably never be rebuilt. If you want to visit it, you have to convince a farmer to let you borrow his mule, for nobody in the surrounding area is willing to go within twelve miles of its wreckage, and once you arrive you can hardly blame them. The few scraps of the building that have survived are covered with a thick and prickly type of ivy called kudzu, which makes it difficult to see what the hospital looked like when the Baudelaires first arrived in the V.F.D. van.

anagram analysis

since i first read these books so long ago, there has been a neuron in my brain that is solely devoted to the name Laura V. Bleediotie. iconic.

anagrams have appeared all over the books so far, but this is the first time we've had them pointed out to us. there are plenty of references and shout-outs hidden among them which are fun to look up, but most curiously we have the final name on the hospital's list of patients: Carrie E. Abelabudite - an anagram of Beatrice Baudelaire.

the Snicket files

what appear to be a few mundane sentences from our narrator's past with Beatrice, but will actually (i swear) underpin the next several books!

...if I could somehow go back to that terrible Thursday, and stop Beatrice from attending that afternoon tea where she met Esmé Squalor for the first time.

more tantalizingly, later on:

Was it really necessary? Was it absolutely necessary to steal that sugar bowl from Esmé Squalor?

the temptation to tattoo that sentence on my body...

no, the real Snicket files

Hal, the half-blind guardian of the Library of Records, gives us an absolute banger of a chapter-ender when he casually informs the orphans that there was something about them in... the Snicket file. we don't get to see it, but the kids do hunt down the Baudelaire file - or at least a page of it - and by now it should be no surprise that the Snickets, the Baudelaires, and likely even the Quagmires are deeply intertwined.

now we need to talk about Esmé

what a reprehensible adult but at the same time, what a fucking diva. as a poorly-cultured tween, this book was my introduction to the phrase 'stiletto heels' and i've always preferred Esmé's insane adaptation with literal stiletto blades.

also, Esmé fucking Squalor is such a fantastic name. she's the dark-circus-chic equivalent of Amelia Bedelia and i can't help but love it.

most unfortunate event

objectively it's having to thwart your sister's nonconsensual cranioectomy, but subjectively it is definitely having to hear that stupid fucking Volunteers Fighting Disease song.

overall thoughts

again we pick up right where we left off - the kids are in the trunk of Count Olaf's car, having had no other safe option. they soon roll up to the Caligari Carnival, where they are able to put on disguises and present themselves as circus freaks to avoid detection.

the plot points come hard and fast. a faux psychic giving Olaf the Baudelaires' location? a glimmer of hope for the survival of one of their parents? stuff happens in this one, which is excellent because this installment is just as heartbreaking as Austere Academy...

i don't have as many quotes noted down for this one! perhaps a fluke.

fatalistic 'freaks'

good on the series for making it super clear that calling someone a freak because of their appearance or abilities is a heinous thing to do!

there's some non-heinous humor to these characters, especially Kevin, whose freakishness is just being ambidextrous and not being able to shut up about it lol. but overall i still felt too sad for these poor folks to find it very funny. :c

i also like that they joined Olaf's troupe - i mean, i hate it for them but i'm glad they didn't become just another set of characters that we met one time in that one book. they stick around a little.

a sinister schism

and here we learn that there are actually two sides to VFD. Madame Lulu tells us that something caused a schism in the organization - not everyone with the eye tattoo is as evil as Olaf. the late Jacques Snicket must have been on the other side of the divide...

she also gives the kids (and Olaf) their next destination: none other than VFD Headquarters, up in the Mortmain Mountains.

the losses

y'all i meant it when i said this book is sad. oh, those poor lions... and poor dear Madame Lulu, a woman who just wanted to make others happy and ended up on the wrong side of the story. her name was Olivia and my heart breaks for her.

and worse, for the first time, the kids are truly separated! we end with Sunny in Count Olaf's clutches while Klaus and Violet careen down the mountain in a caravan car. i fear these kids will get no rest at all for the next couple of books...

most unfortunate event

becoming the arsonists themselves and burning Caligari Carnival to the ground.

overall thoughts

top! tier! installment!!! my notes for this book are longer than the last three books combined because so much happens. the callbacks to earlier books are everywhere - and will continue to be - as though the story is circling closed.

Violet and Klaus begin in the snowy Mortmain Mountains, fleeing horrible snow gnats and the noxious influence of Carmelita fucking Spats, who is with a group of Snow Scouts heading up to Mount Fraught. Sunny is stuck on the mountaintop in the sinister clutches of Count Olaf and Esmé Squalor. and a potential new friend has made an appearance... who is the masked Snow Scout?

the snicket files

our narrator is sugarbowlposting again!

My dear sister ... I have at last learned the whereabouts of the evidence that will exonerate me, a phrase which here means "prove to the authorities that it is Count Olaf, and not me, who has started so many fires." Your suggestion, so many years ago at that picnic, that a tea set would be a handy place to hide anything important and small in the event of a dark day, has turned out to be correct.

a Quagmire acquaintance

much to my delight (as evidenced by the all-caps and exclamation points in my notes) our mysterious, helpful Snow Scout friend turns out to be none other than the lost Quagmire sibling, Quigley.

Quigley and Violet pair up for a strenuous climb up the frozen waterfall and quickly grow quite fond of each other. the narrative makes a point of protecting the privacy of their time together, reminding us that these kids have had so little privacy since their parents' death, but there are mentions of shy smiles that made my heart all warm and fuzzy. we love nice things for Violet. <3

the lost and found Quagmire gets separated from the Baudelaires in the river currents, though, because Violet can't have nice things.

vee eff dee

we get the scoop straight from Quigley - the burnt remains at which the children arrive are the headquarters of... the Volunteer Fire Department.

it seems that someone had hoped they were coming, because all of the pieces are in place for Klaus to solve a puzzle. he even comments on how weird this is, and how it seems like he and his siblings, along with the Quagmires, were all being secretly trained in the ways of the VFD ever since they were little.

we simply must talk about Sunny

there is so much of her in this book and i adore it despite her atrocious circumstances.

...she had grown since then, and was able to take an active part in defeating Count Olaf and his troupe, while still having time to prepare a seafood dish.

our girl is an independent little chef extraordinaire at the age of -checks notes- baby. i'm so proud. she's been coming into this interest of hers ever since the Caligari Carnival, where she added cinnamon to a pot of hot chocolate, much to everyone's delight.

quality quotes

"I know that having a good vocabulary doesn't guarantee that I'm a good person," the boy said. "But it does mean I've read a great deal. And in my experience, well-read people are less likely to be evil."

"We could take her prisoner," Quigley said, and everyone was quiet. Taking someone prisoner, of course, is a villainous thing to do, and when you think of doing a villainous thing - even if you have a very good reason for thinking of doing it - it can make you feel like a villain, too. Lately, the Baudelaires had been doing things like wearing disguises and helping burn down a carnival, and were beginning to feel more and more like villains themselves.

That no life lives forever; That dead men rise up never; That even the weariest river; Winds somewhere safe to sea.

fighters and fortunes

we get the names of two other members of VFD. one is Dr. Isaac Anwhistle, known as Ike to his friends - and his wife, the late Aunt Josephine. the other, mentioned in passing, is the real science fiction author CM Kornbluth.

later, when Olaf is gloating about his plans to capture the Snow Scouts, he mentions by name the Spats fortune, the Kornbluth fortune, and the Winnipeg fortune. interesting...

dramatics personae

there's a pair of new foes to contend with: the very Nightvalian woman with hair but no beard, and the man with a beard but no hair. i have no idea who these people are, but they mean business and Olaf is scared of them, so they can't bode well for the orphans.

but there are also losses. in a heartbreaking scene, the two white-faced woman leave the acting troupe and take their chances leaving the mountains on their own.

one says: We don't want to participate in your schemes anymore. For a while, it was fun to fight fire with fire, but we've seen enough flames and smoke to last our whole lives.

and the other continues: We don't think that it was a coincidence that our home burned to the ground. We lost a sibling in that fire, Olaf.

the eagles y'all

remember way back in book the third, when our narrator informs us that he saw the woman he loved carried off by an eagle? the fucking eagles work for the VFD. first, we get this aside:

...toward the sky, where my associates and I used to watch the volunteer eagles who could spot smoke from a very great distance.

but later, we learn that the man/woman with a beard/hair but no hair/beard seem to currently be in control of the eagles, along with the lions - this must be where the lions from the carnival came from. they also imply that Olaf's faction of the schism had control of the carrier crows (from the Vile Village?) and the trained reptiles (from the Reptile Room?). indeed, we bump into the man who packed up Uncle Monty's collection after his death. the plot has been thick from the very beginning...

where to now?

in a few days, Olaf and his minions will descend upon the last bastion of the VFD - the Hotel Denouement - and attempt to burn it to the ground. the kids are going to have to try to get there first.

most unfortunate event

one thousand percent the borderline enslavement of Sunny.

honorable mention to when the phrase "the world is quiet here" is described as four small words, because how did that slip through editing?

overall thoughts

plot? fabulous. deep ocean vibes? phenomenal. reading experience? mired by some character speech quirks that i found incredibly abrasive to the eye - that's my biggest but only complaint. once i got into the groove of ignoring the Widdershin propensity to exclaim "Aye!" and the villains' stupid fancy laughter, the actual story grabbed me by the face and held on until it was over.

the Baudelaires are plucked from the rushing waters of Stricken Stream by the submarine Queequeg, helmed by Captain Widdershins and his mycologist stepdaughter, Fiona. they're searching for the ever-so-important sugar bowl, and the kids quickly fall in and do their best to help.

their investigations lead them into strange currents and caverns, and of course, the villains are always lurking...

welcome to my alley

as an ocean baby, this shift into maritime dread was delightful. the descriptions of drifting blindly through the dark water, letting the current bounce them along as it likely did the sugar bowl... fabulous stuff. i also happen to be a fungus nerd, so mycological representation made me very happy.

awaited answers

we learn the following from Captain Widdershins. i've lightly paraphrased it for the sake of my benighted eyes (and yours).

VFD isn't just a fire department. It started that way, but the volunteers were interested in every such thing. I was one of the first to sign up for Voluntary Fish Domestication. That was one of the missions of Anwhistle Aquatics. The program was a modest success. But then Café Salmonella came along, and took our entire fleet away. The Snicket siblings fought as best they could. Kit Snicket helped build this submarine! Jacques Snicket proved that the Royal Gardens fire was arson.

book ONE, y'all. i noted down the reference to the Royal Gardens way back in book ONE and had no idea it was going to come back around. i was very excited about this development. :3

i insist we talk about Anwhistle Aquatics

okay, first of all, Anwhistle Aquatics specialized in marine research and rhetorical advice and it seems to have been run by our old friend Ike Anwhistle and his brother, Gregor.

after drifting through the grotto, the kids end up on a subterranean beach with some ruined rooms - the deep basement of Anwhistle Aquatics. this is where they find not only the Medusoid Mycelium, but also some clues. this letter was written to Gregor Anwhistle by none other than Kit Snicket!

The poisonous fungus you insist on cultivating in the grotto will bring grim consequences for all of us. Our factory at Lousy Lane can provide some dilution of the mycelium's destructive respiratory capabilities, and you assure me that the mycelium grows best in small, enclosed spaces, but this is of little comfort. One mistake, Gregor, and your entire facility would have to be abandoned. Please, do not become the thing you dread most by adopting the destructive tactic of our most villainous enemies: playing with fire.

you guys. Lousy Lane smells like horseradish. Lousy Lane smells like horseradish because its the antidote to the Medusoid Mycelium.

siblings reunited

but not who you might think - i was just as shocked as Fiona to bump into her long-lost brother, the hook-handed man. his name is Fernald, and the Daily Punctilio reported long ago that he was the one that burned down Anwhistle Aquatics. but as he insists and we've already seen, the Daily Punctilio is rarely a reliable source of information - Fernald maintains that there is good and evil on both sides of the schism. he helps the Baudelaires get back to the now-abandoned Queequeg, but he ultimately stays with Olaf's troupe. Fiona, unwilling to lose her brother again, joins the troupe as well.

the two poets

the crew of the Queequeg wear uniform with the image of Herman Melville. Olaf's crew wear uniforms with the image of Edgar Guest. i fear i don't have the words to express myself in any smart kind of way, but i think the fire the VFD was really trying to put out was anti-intellectualism and in this year of our dark lord 2026 that hits close to home.

Sunny's continued horrors

look, i'm not going to get into it too deep because it's actually rather harrowing, but suffice it to say that Sunny spends a good third of this book in imminent mortal peril and i was not okay.

back to the bad beginning

with Fiona having defected and Captain Widdershins nowhere to be found, a last glimmer of hope comes in the form of a telegram - from Quigley!

after decoding its real message, the forlorn Baudelaires pilot the submarine back to where it all began: the shores of Briny Beach. there is a taxi waiting for them. in the taxi is a strange woman. the woman's name... is Kit Snicket.

most unfortunate event

Sunny literally almost dying on Violet's fifteenth birthday.

overall thoughts

most unfortunate event

the dastardly demise of Dewey Denouement. :c

overall thoughts

most unfortunate event

all of it, and none of it.