A Series of Unfortunate Events: The End

Over the Christmas break I read Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events: The End. It is a fictional book that takes place in present times of three orphans named the Baudelaire’s. The oldest Baudelaire’s name is Violet who is seventeen, Klaus who is around my age and Sunny who is still a baby. This is Lemony Snicket’s thirteenth and final book of this series. I believe this was his best book as it was not too detailed and it had good dialogue. Again, as expected he did a fantastic job describing the orphans and their many hardships.

This novel begins with the orphans on a beaten up ship with the main villain of the series Count Olaf as the captain. They are the only ones on the ship and have no clue where they are sailing because they were in a rush to leave a hotel that had set on fire because of Olaf. Later on after a few treacherous days with this horrible villain that the orphans hated very much, they wound up in a storm that destroyed their ship. Luckily they were shipwrecked on a coastal shelf when a little girl named Friday brings the orphans to an island. Olaf is not invited due to his “rude” behaviour. When the orphans arrive to the island they sleep in little huts and drink the islands only drink called coconut cordial. This drink dulls the senses of the islanders to allow the leader of the island, Ishmael to control them. Ishmael is a nice seeming person at the beginning of the novel, but turns out to be another one of the many enemies the orphans have. The islanders eat only a few meals most of which contain seaweed. All the islanders are people who had been shipwrecked and who had wound up on this island like the orphans. This is about the time when the islanders sense something wrong with Ishmael and form a rebellion.

Later on in the book, the orphans pregnant friend named Kit ends up swept on the shores of the island. She had endured a vicious storm and was in critical condition. This is about the time when Olaf shows up on the island on his own and threatens the islanders with a deadly poison called the medusoid mycelium, which only gives an hour for the infected to live. It is curable by only two things, wasabi and horseradish. He keeps the poison in a divers helmet that was used in a previous Lemony Snicket book called the Grim Grotto. Eventually, after a large argument, Ishmael attempts to shoot Olaf with his harpoon gun, which shatters the diving helmet causing all the islanders to become infected. After the orphans are infected they go on a desperate mission to save themselves, their pregnant friend who was still left on the raft because no one was willing to help the orphans bring her down, the islanders, Ishmael, and maybe even Olaf. They eventually discover from an old book that the apple tree at the other end of the island contains horseradish with little time left. They each eat an apple and save some for the rest of the people. When they get back to the other end of the island they find that the islanders and Ishmael had fled on a ship that they had worked on for a year. They also find Olaf dead and Kit infected and going into labour. She refuses to eat the apple as it may have hurt the baby. The orphans end up taking care of the baby girl on the island after Kit passes away.

This book is written in the third person style and at times can be too detailed. I find with Lemony’s books that when he comes to a new chapter or a complicated word he tends to trail off on the most random and boring topics. It was funny the first few books but it has become long and tedious to read because of this. The book had a good average amount of dialogue. I would recommend it for kids eleven and up due to some difficult word choices the author has made. This book doesn’t relate to any of my experiences other than when I saw the movie to the first, second, and third book. It also reminds me of the many books I’ve read where the children get shipwrecked. Lord of The Flies and the Island series just to name a couple.

Lemony Snicket is a very good author and has produced some of the best books I have ever read, but there are a few minor issues that make him in my opinion a cut below authors like J.K. Rowling and D.J. Machale. Like I mentioned above he is using too much detail at the beginning of chapters. Other than stuff like this, Lemony is one my favourite writers.