Having escaped Count Olaf's clutches for now, the three Baudelaire siblings, Violent, Klaus and Sunny, arrive on the shores of Lake Lachrymose to stay with their latest guardian, Aunt Josephine. Sadly, though kind and well-meaning, Aunt Josephine is terrified of absolutely everything: she will not heat her radiators, use the telephone or cook food, just in case those ordinary tasks prove fatal. Worse still, she gives Violet a doll called Pretty Penny and obsessively corrects the children's grammar. It is not long before local sailor Captain Sham, a thinly-disguised Count Olaf, gulls Aunt Josephine with the idea of a surprise for the children. Aunt Josephine suddenly goes missing that night, leaving a highly ungrammatical note, and the Baudelaire's must once again fight their way out of Count Olaf's wicked schemes. Finally, after sailing across the Lachrymose Lake in Hurricane Herman, a nasty moment in the Curdled Cave and an unpleasant encounter with the Lachrymose Leeches for Aunt Josephine, they unmask Captain Sham as Count Olaf. Olaf slips through their grasp once more but evilly promises to find them again, as he will in The Miserable Mill.
After their uncle's death the Baudelaires are moved to their Aunt Josephine's who lives on the top of a cliff looking down on the sea. She is scared of everything including the water below her home. Soon after being intrusted to Josephine's care she becomes infatuated with a pirate by the name of Captain Sham. Personally, I don't understand why anyone would be infatuated by a pirate that isn't in the form of Johnny Depp but each to their own. In the end, this admiration became a fatal attraction minus Glen Close.
Aunt Josephine is also obsessed with proper grammar and sometimes the book felt like a fucked up English lesson, although grammatical errors played an important part of the story later.
I really enjoyed this one, the premise was so looney (looneyer than the first two anyway). I also appreciate the proper grammar segments, such as when to use who and whom. Mr. Poe, the man who is in charge of the desired inheritance until Violet comes of age is starting to irk me. Are people really that blind? I think he's almost as bad as Olaf as he is partly responsible for putting the children into these nasty situations. But then again if everything was hunky dory we would have a story would we?
Reading updates
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Started reading
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26 October, 2016:
Finished reading
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26 October, 2016:
Reviewed