This book IS NOT for readers that want to hurry through the last book of a series simply to get the answers that they are craving.

This book IS for readers that have absolutely fallen in love with Lemony Snicket’s writing style. If this is you, you won't mind the run on sentences, the numerous summaries that bring us back to books 1-12, the various “well known” facts and definitions sprinkled through, or the passages that seem to serve no purpose at all other than adding to the anxiety of finishing the series.

“…some things are better left in the great unknown.”

Mr. Snicket is a clever one indeed.

My favorite passages:

The Baudelaires looked out at the sea, and saw what Olaf was talking about. Spilling across the sky, like ink staining a precious document, was an immense bank of black clouds.

The moral of the story is that if you tell yourself you can do something, then you can actually do it, a moral easily disproved if you tell yourself they can eat nine pints of ice cream and a single sitting, or that you can ship wreck yourself on a distant island simply by setting off in a rented canoe with holes sawed in it.

As you know if you've ever skimmed a book, you end up getting a strange view of the story, with just glimpses here and there of what is going on, and some authors insert confusing sentences in the middle of a book just to confuse anyone who might be skimming. Three very short men were carrying a large, flat piece of wood, painted to look like a living room. As the Baudelaire orphans searched...