Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

NOTE: Spoiler alert! (Thanks to Tommy for letting me know)

Mediocre and disappointing. For the most part, The Series of Unfortunate Events provides a good set of light reading. Repetitive phrasing, stark imagery and clever descriptions of words gives them the definitive feel of children's books while the plots and dialogues are adequately entertaining for adults. Though the character development is certainly a little thin, the reader still finds themselves deeply attached to Sunny, Violet and Claus and therefore ready to read on to find out their fate.

The End was disappointing because the end was no end at all. Of course most novels "end" with the characters continuing on without us - the readers - but "The End" leaves us with the Baudelaires just as we found them: in a boat in the middle of the sea. The only difference between the beginning and the end of the book is the state of the Baudelaires' hearts. At the beginning they are despairing, at the end they are not. They are not happy, mind you, nor particularly hopeful, but they are not in despair.

Further, there are developments in the relationships of some of the characters that are simply bizarre. Fiction has every right to take liberties with possibility and to catch us off guard at any moment, but there must still be a sense and an order to things. You cannot conjure love stories out of thin air just because you have two characters dying at once and the love story would make the scene more poignant. There has to be a background, a history, SOME sort of explanation when every prior encounter with the character has contradicted the present moment. Forgive me if that's a little vague, but I do hate spoilers.

All in all, the book was a disappointment. A poor tribute to the wit and mystery of the prior books in the series.