A Series of Unfortunate Events, Book the Fifth

As we plow through this series on audio book, we continue to miss Tim Curry (who voiced both The Bad Beginning and The Reptile Room), but are very grateful that Daniel Handler’s audio has vastly improved since The Wide Window and The Miserable Mill. His soft narration in the previous books required that we crank our car stereo up to 50, which blew our ear drums out whenever he voiced a character like Count Olaf (a rendition, I might add, which is a terribly annoying, screechy voice that doesn’t at all fit the character we all have in our minds). The Harper Audio team finally managed to level out the sounds in this book, making it moderately more enjoyable to hear.

This story kicks the mysterious world of the Baudelaire orphans into high gear. We learn of secrets that have thus far only been implied, and while we know that we’ve still got eight more books to go before The End, the clues we’re getting now are intriguing and help morph their world into a more carefully designed whole. Specifically, Lemony Snicket gives more depth to his mysterious relationship with the lost Beatrice to whom he dedicates all of his books.

This book finds the Baudelaire orphans attending the Prufrock Preparatory School, a place as miserable and cartoonishly nonsensical as any they’ve visited thus far. In taking a break from seeking guardianship, however, they at least get to enjoy a short respite from betrayal by those adults who ought to be their caretakers. Or so it seems.

The principal, the teachers, the other students—everyone seems to be in cahoots to continue the orphans’ lives of misery and despair. Young Carmelita Spats is perhaps the worst cake-sniffing student you’ll ever meet, which makes her the instant favorite of the school’s new gym teacher, Coach Genghis (or rather another villain in disguise).

The saving grace of the school and this book is that it puts the Baudelaires in touch with a new set of friends, the two Quagmire triplets. “Two triplets?” you might ask. Yes, because the Quagmire children are orphans too, their parents and brother Quigley having also died in a fire, similar to the fate of the Baudelaire parents.

The five children become fast friends and realize that their stories align more than they had first supposed. When the Quagmires are kidnapped by Olaf’s crew at the end of the book, Duncan Quagmire screams a code to the Baudelaires which becomes a character in itself for the rest of the series, “VFD.”

Something that keep’s Snicket’s book entertaining even to adults is his constant need to define words for his characters and readers alike. “A word which here means…” is a recurring phrase that not only helps kids understand the big words he’s using but also gives Snicket ample opportunity for comedic relief. Sometimes his definitions are straight from the dictionary and other times, not even close.

Overall, this book made it feel like the series was finally going somewhere, and Snicket’s intent to show us exactly where began to coalesce. The Quagmires will be key players in the next two books as well, so this introduction to them is a necessary element to this Series of Unfortunate Events.

©2021 E.T.

Read More in A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket:

1. A Bad Beginning by Lemony Snicket (1999)
2. The Reptile Room by Lemony Snicket (1999)
3. The Wide Window by Lemony Snicket (2000)
4. The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket (2000)
5. The Austere Academy by Lemony Snicket (2000)
6. The Ersatz Elevator by Lemony Snicket (2001)
7. The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket (2001)
8. The Hostile Hotel by Lemony Snicket (2001)
9. The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket (2002)
10. The Slipper Slope by Lemony Snicket (2003)
11. The Grim Grotto by Lemony Snicket (2004)
12. The Penultimate Peril by Lemony Snicket (2005)
13. The End by Lemony Snicket (2006)