You guys, even I’m getting tired of my Series of Unfortunate Events reviews. I don’t think there’s too much left to say about the books as they are very much all of a kind, and unlike the wonderful, authorless Harry Potter books, they don’t increase in complexity or thematic depth with their readers. It’s the same damn book over again: Baudelaire orphans meet their new home and a new variety of inept adult, find Count Olaf behind a disguise along with one or more of his cohorts, find no help from said inept adult, Olaf escapes, the orphans are placed anew.
And so on.
This time they end up in a school, Prufrock Academy, that literally sequesters the orphans in a separate cabin, so happily they meet another set of orphans, the Quagmire triplets, and become friends. In this case, the two are the only surviving siblings in a triplet set, and there’s something rather moving about the way they are referred to as triplets intentionally (and subtly referred to as twins by the inept or evil adults).
For once, Olaf manages to complete a scheme (in this case exhausting the children by posing as their gym teacher and having them run laps at night so as to have them fail tests and get expelled) but again the Baudelaire children foil him with the Quagmires replacing them for a night. Their new friends, on the other hand, were introduced to be kidnapped in their stead were not so lucky.
The introduction of new characters livens the series up, but not enough. Repeat indeed.
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