I'm glad I pulled through on The Miserable Mill despite being tempted to call it quits on A Series of Unfortunate Events due to how ....miserable I found it. Things definitely picked back up for me in The Austere Academy. The audiobooks also have Tim Curry back as the narrator for this one, and he is a delight.

Olaf's approach is a little more underhanded in this one, along with adding the world's rudest principal into the mix of villains. Things are getting continuously unfortunate for the Baudelaires, but we get breaks from it when they make friends with the two Quagmire triplets and their suspiciously similar backstory, and some humor imbued by Sunny's secretarial career and the toe-pinching crabs in the orphan shack.

We're beginning to pick up hints of something beyond the Baudelaires latest terrible guardian (once again, while hyperbolic - I've definitely had one or two 'educators' who could align a bit too much to Principal Nero) and that Lemony Snicket is seeming to have more of a role in the story outside of just narrating it. The mystery is definitely becoming genuinely intriguing to me.