- Ages 8 and up
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19 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
Femme Fatales and Hilarious Hijinks
By Jim Schmidt
I'm not a kid who grew up with and loved Lemony Snicket's Series/Unfortunate Events...I'm a 40-something who loved them...I was so happy to learn a new series was here...it has all the charm of the previous series and even more...adults are still the inmates running the asylum and from S. Theodora Markson to the "Officers Mitchum" to others, "Snicket" (Daniel Handler) has once again created some absurd, ridiculous, and unforgettable characters. The first appearance of "word which here means..." warmed my heart and soul considerably. There are some true giggle-out-loud moments but I won;t give them away in the review. You HAVE to read the book! In Ellington Feint he has drawn the best femme fatale since Jessica Rabbit and in Moxie Mallahan a sweet and intrepid sidekick. It's a genius of Handler that he captures the innocence and angst of affection between and among teens so well. Can;t wait for book #2. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
55 of 65 people found the following review helpful.
Noiry noirish noirable noir
By E. R. Bird
Last year I was running a bookgroup for kids, ages 9-12, when the subject of children's books adapted into films came up. We talked about the relative success of Harry Potter, the bewildering movie that was City of Ember, and the gorgeous credit sequence for A Series of Unfortunate Events. Then one of the younger members, probably around ten years of age, turned to me and asked in all seriousness, "Do you think they'll ever make a movie out of The Spiderwick Chronicles?" I was momentarily floored. It's not often that kids will remind me that their memories of pop culture are limited to their own experiences, but once in a while it happens. This girl couldn't remember back five years to that very film adaptation. And why should she? She was five then! So when I see a new Lemony Snicket series acting as a kind of companion to the aforementioned A Series of Unfortunate Events I wonder how it will play out. The original series was popular around the time of that Spiderwick movie. Does that mean that the new series will founder, or will it be so successful that it brings renewed interest to the previous, still in print and relatively popular, books? Personally, I haven't a clue. All I know is that the latest Lemony Snicket series All the Wrong Questions is a work of clever references, skintight writing, and a deep sense of melancholy that mimics nothing else out there on the market for kids today. That's a good thing.To be a success in Snicket's line of work it's important to know how to ask the right questions. And this is a problem since Snicket finds it difficult doing precisely that. He was supposed to meet his contact in the city. Instead, he finds himself whisked away to the country to a dying town called Stain'd-by-the-Sea. Once a bustling harbor, the town's water was removed leaving behind a creepy seaweed forest and an ink business that won't be around much longer. With his incompetent mentor S. Theodora Markson he's there to solve the mystery of a stolen statue. Never mind that the statue wasn't stolen, its owners don't care who has it, and their client isn't even a real person. When Snicket finds a girl looking for her father and learns the name of the insidious Hangfire things start to get interesting, not to mention dangerous. Can multiple mysteries be solved even if you keep following the wrong paths? Snicket's about to find out.What is more dangerous: Evil or stupidity? It's a trick question since there's nothing "or" about it. If there's one lesson to be gleaned from the Snicket universe, it is that while evil is undesirable, stupidity is downright damaging. Many is the Series of Unfortunate Events book that would show clear as crystal that while stupid and ignorant people may not necessarily be evil in and of themselves, they do more to aid in evil than any routine bad guy ever could hope for. In All the Wrong Questions the adults in charge are still inane, but at least the kids have a bit of autonomy from them. Our hero, the young Snicket, is still omnipotent to a certain degree, and only cares to share personal information with the reader when the plot requires that he do so. And because the book is a mystery, he's almost required to move about at will. He just happens to be moving between stupid people much of the time.Of course the trouble with having Lemony himself as your protagonist is that the guy is infamous for never giving you good news. If adult Snicket is the kind of guy who warns off readers (in a voice that I've always connected to Ben Stein) because of his own sad worldview, reading this series means that we are going to see failure at work. We saw failure at work with the Baudelaires but with them it was always the fault of the universe using them as punching bags more than their own inadequacies. That means that the author's trick with this book is to keep it from disintegrating into depression even as its hero ultimately screws up (yet seems to be doing the right thing the whole time). How do you pull this dichotomy off? Humor. Thank god for humor. Because like other post-modern children's mysteries (Mac Barnett's The Brixton Brothers, most notably) being funny is the key to simultaneously referencing old mystery tropes while commenting on them.I always had a certain amount of difficulty figuring out how exactly to describe A Series of Unfortunate Events. The term "Gothic" just didn't quite cut it. PoMo Gothic, maybe. Or Meta-Gothic. Dunno. The All the Wrong Questions series makes it much easier on me. This book is noir. Noiry noir. Noiry noirish noirable noir. As if to confirm this the author drops in names like Dashiell and Mitchum, which like all of Snicket's jokes will fly over the heads of all the child readers and 82.5% of the adult readers as well (I kept a tally for a while of the references I knew that I myself was not getting, then just sort of stopped after a while). There are dames, or at least the 12-year-old equivalent of dames. There are Girl Fridays. There are mistaken identities and creepy abandoned buildings. There are also butlers who do things, but that's more of a drawing room murder mystery genre trope, so we're going to disregard it here.Let us talk Seth. The man comes to fill the shoes left by Brett Helquist. He's a clever choice since there is nothing even slightly Helquistian to this comic legend. This is, to the best of my knowledge Seth's first work for children, though there may well be some obscure Canadian work of juvenilia in his past that I've missed. His work on the cover is remarkable in and of itself, but in the book he works primarily in chapter headings and the occasional full-page layout. The author must have relayed to Mr. Seth what images to do sometimes because there is a picture at the beginning and a picture at the end that continue the story above and beyond the written portions. As for the spreads inside, Seth does an admirable job of ever concealing young Snicket's face. He also lends a funny lightness to the proceedings, not something I would have expected walking into the novel.There is a passage in the book where Snicket reflects on his life that just kills me. It comes a quarter of the way through the novel and is the clearest indication to the reader that the action in this novel happened a long time ago. It goes on for a while until finally ending with, "Stretched out in front of me was my time as an adult, and then a skeleton, and then nothing except perhaps a few books on a few shelves." Put another way, this isn't your average mystery novel for kids. It's not even your average Lemony Snicket novel. It is what it is, the first part in a new series containing a familiar character that need not be previously known to readers. I have no idea if kids will gravitate towards it, but if you've a hankering to recommend a beautifully written if uncommon mystery to kids that ask for that sort of thing (and they do, man, they do) hand this over. Worse case scenario, they don't like it. Best case scenario it blows their little minds. Blew mine anyway. Good stuff.For ages 9-12.
29 of 34 people found the following review helpful.Who Could it Be Now?
By Kendra
Lemony Snicket has always reminded me a little bit of Edward Gorey (which here means creating settings where a boy named Neville might just die of ennui (which here means boredom)) and Roald Dahl (which here means creating adult characters who act mean and stupid because that's what adults are).His series of Unfortunate Events was immensely popular and as we all know following up one popular series of books with another is not easy. Harper Lee stopped after "To Kill a Mockingbird" which was probably a good thing. Stop while you're ahead. J.K. Rowling decided to write some more which would have only been a good idea if Harry Potter was still somehow involved.But Lemony Snicket, in his new book "Who Could That Be at This Hour?" may have broken the trend. I found this book very readable (which here means I couldn't put it down) and his characters and setting perhaps more relatable and enjoyable than anything else he has previously written.Dare I say that the thirteen-year-old Snicket who narrates the book is far more optimistic, caring and kind than his adult persona that narrates the Series of Unfortunate Events? Dare I say that this series may even hold more promise than his last?There were times when this book reminded me of a twisted version of Encyclopedia Brown with Lemony as Brown and his lighthouse keeper's daughter friend Moxie as Encyclopedia Brown's trusty sidekick Sally. There was even a Bugs Meeny character. I loved Encyclopedia Brown and that this book reminded me of him is a good thing.There were also times when Lemony reminded me of a young Sherlock Holmes, given his own Irene Adler and his own Baker Street Irregulars in the form of taxi cab enthusiasts Pip and Squeak.All good things.And good things make me want to read more.
