January 24, 2015
Book three (or rather "Book the Third") of the A Series of Unfortunate Events. I stated my intention to have these be my classroom reading books, but I was so into this one that I couldn't resist borrowing the ebook and finishing it. I have been sharing my appreciation for the books with a colleague and some of my students. The colleague assured me that, though this book did follow the pattern I'd detected, they won't all do so. I think my enthusiasm inspired the showing of the film as one of our activity options yesterday. I couldn't watch it, though; I was supervising volleyball in the gym.
Though I'd be tempted to inflict violence on the evil and relentless Olaf, the Baudelaire children are more moral than that. They're practically Jainists; they wouldn't even kill the flesh-eating leeches that were swarming their sailboat. Being on a higher moral plane than their enemy, they will need all of their wits to beat him...if they can. Because once again, the adults in their lives are useless.
Mr. Poe shows that he has some balls, very briefly, near the end of the book, when he yells at Olaf and sticks up for the orphans. But when Olaf ran, he wouldn't go after him or his obese cohort. And he's still a total moron. He was perfectly willing to sign custody of the kids over to "Captain Sham" (oh, come on!) after he thought Aunt Josephine committed suicide. I mean, they'd been with her like a week, and she'd met the disguised Olaf just that day...wouldn't he consider her unstable, and just find the kids a new home? And a bodyguard? Hello?
Josephine was something else. Not only was she an over-the-top grammar Nazi, but she was afraid of just about everything: phones, stoves, doorknobs, door mats, just name it and she had a phobia of it. The kids couldn't hide their impatience for her in the end, but were still upset when Olaf threw her in the lake to be eaten by the leeches. That's the same way her husband died, though I don't think Olaf caused that one.
Olaf kind of drops the hint at the end of this book that he caused the fire that killed the kids' parents. It's a super brief reference, and I don't think the traumatized kids caught it. He's a real bastard. Please let something really bad happen to him!
The next book is called The Miserable Mill. Oh, great. Are these poor kids gonna be forced into child labor? These books would be too sad if it weren't for the silly narrator. I found myself smirking, even laughing out loud, more than anything else as I read this book. There are even more tidbits about "Snicket" in this one, such as the brief story of a girlfriend who was carried off by a giant eagle. Were Snicket a whiskey brewer he probably would have rescued her, but he is a self-confessed coward...though a funny one at that.
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