The Miserable Mill

In The Miserable Mill, the Baudelaire orphans once again encounter an uncaring guardian, a plot by Count Olaf to get their money, and an almost complete lack of help from the adults around them. Snicket isn't making huge changes to his formula (yet), but he's having a lot of fun playing around with the details.

This time around, Count Olaf stays off page for more than half the book. Everyone knows he's going to show up eventually, and waiting for it to happen creates some great tension. And when he finally does arrive, it's even a bit surprising because of his disguise of choice this time around. We also get some more hints at his past. This book introduces and then kills Dr. Orwell, another of Olaf's associates who hadn't yet been introduced. But she is also associated with the eye Olaf has tattooed on his ankle. It appears on the cover of her book and her home/office is designed to look like it.

Violet and Klaus are also forced to switch places a bit this time around. The plot hinges on Violet doing research late into the night and Klaus inventing something on the fly. It's fun to see them take strength from imagining what the other would do. And Sunny continues to protect everyone with her abnormally sharp teeth, which she here uses in a sword fight that brought me out of the story a bit. I mean, really?

This book also featured a rather gruesome on-page death that made it feel much darker than the previous books. This is far from the first death in these books, but it's definitely the most gory. I'm surprised it made it into a children's book, and I'm wondering how Snicket will continue to raise the stakes after this.

Next up, the orphans are heading to school. Which I had been wondering about. I suppose it's just been summer vacation since the series started, though.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more