All The Wrong Questions, Book 2
As we delve a bit deeper into this “new” series by Lemony Snicket, we’re finding that the story has gotten a bit more violent…and a bit more thrilling. While this second installment felt like it contained fewer of the telltale Snicket elements that we’ve come to love, it kept the overall story moving beyond the simple mystery from Book 1 of a missing statue and introduced us instead to the deeper, darker world in which the protagonist finds himself.
Lemony Snicket, the man who narrated A Series of Unfortunate Events, is but 12 years old in this four-book series, so although published afterwards, it serves as a sort-of prequel to the more popular series. And while we know that Snicket eventually has personal ties to the unfortunate Baudelaire children when he becomes an adult, we don’t get a sense of their connection yet. Certainly, this is the same dark and dreary world in which the Baudelaire kids live, but so far there’s no places to connect them.
One new discovery in this second book is the real villain of the series, a Mr. Hangfire. Hangfire appears to be an Olaf-type villain with a very special skillset (beyond thievery, kidnapping, and murder of course): he can make his voice sound like anyone on the planet, which too often makes our protagonist worry about whether or not that person he just met on the phone really was whom he said he was.
Hangfire also has an agenda here, which is why there’s been so much trouble in the town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea: he wants to steal the recipe for invisible ink and to get the old Ink, Inc factory to produce it en masse. He needs to kidnap scientists and children to make this dream a reality.
My kids (10 and 12) are enjoying this series, but I think they would have enjoyed it more had we all known from the beginning that it serves as a prequel, and that it will eventually have ties to the same V.F.D. we learned so much about in the previous series. I’m not ready to go back and start over of course, but I do think we had a slow start into it simply because we first viewed it as something completely different.
Next up: Shouldn’t You Be in School?
©2023 E.T.