In a fading town, far from anyone he knew or trusted, a young Lemony Snicket began his apprenticeship in an organization nobody knows about. He started by asking questions that shouldn't have been on his mind. Now he has written an account that should not be published, in four volumes that shouldn't be read. This is the first volume.
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Editorial Reviews
From School Library Journal
Gr 4-7-In this "autobiographical" mystery, a teenaged Lemony Snicket recounts his early experiences as an apprentice to S. Theodora Markson, a pretentious woman who is not remotely as intelligent as she pretends. The two travel to the formerly seaside (but now not) town of Stain'd-by-the-Sea to investigate the theft of, what they are told, is a priceless heirloom. The identity of the culprit is obvious. Or is it? There's much more to this case than meets the eye. To uncover what's really going on, the inquisitive Snicket must figure out who he can trust and which questions to ask before it's too late. This fast-paced whodunit is likely to leave readers with questions of their own. Hopefully, they're the right questions-which, hopefully, will be answered in upcoming sequels. Written in Snicket's gloomy, yet undeniably charming, signature style and populated with wonderfully quirky characters, this enjoyable start of a new series will thrill fans of the author's earlier works and have even reluctant readers turning pages with the fervor of seasoned bookworms. A must-have.-Alissa J. Bach, Oxford Public Library, MIα(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
From Booklist
Oh, Lemony Snicket. How you confound us. For instance, in this book, the first of the All the Wrong Questions series, you give us so many unmoored happenings that readers may be inclined to believe they’ve landed in the middle of the second book. True, we will learn you’re an almost-13-year-old boy and that you escape your parents (or are they your parents?!) in a tea room to meet the woman with whom you’ll apprentice. And then you and S. Theodora Markson (what does the S stand for?) make your way to a sea town, now devoid of the ink for which it’s famous, and deserted by its residents, to find a statue rather like the Maltese Falcon, only it’s the Bombinating Beast. Someone is waiting for you back home, but who? What’s this secret program you seem to be a part of? Who cares about the Bombinating Beast? (You may take that comment any way you wish.) But just as when you were with those charming Baudelaire children, the adventures roll and one can only speculate what’s around the corner. Not that it will do any good. Kudos to Seth for the marvelous woodcut art. The pictures seem to hold clues. Or do they? HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Please, it’s Lemony Snicket. Enough said. Grades 4-7. --Ilene Cooper
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
48 of 56 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Last year I was running a bookgroup for kids, ages 9-12, when the subject of children's books adapted into films came up. We talked about the relative success of Harry Potter, the bewildering movie that was City of Ember, and the gorgeous credit sequence for A Series of Unfortunate Events. Then one of the younger members, probably around ten years of age, turned to me and asked in all seriousness, "Do you think they'll ever make a movie out of The Spiderwick Chronicles?" I was momentarily floored. It's not often that kids will remind me that their memories of pop culture are limited to their own experiences, but once in a while it happens. This girl couldn't remember back five years to that very film adaptation. And why should she? She was five then! So when I see a new Lemony Snicket series acting as a kind of companion to the aforementioned A Series of Unfortunate Events I wonder how it will play out. The original series was popular around the time of that Spiderwick movie. Does that mean that the new series will founder, or will it be so successful that it brings renewed interest to the previous, still in print and relatively popular, books? Personally, I haven't a clue. All I know is that the latest Lemony Snicket series All the Wrong Questions is a work of clever references, skintight writing, and a deep sense of melancholy that mimics nothing else out there on the market for kids today. That's a good thing.
To be a success in Snicket's line of work it's important to know how to ask the right questions. And this is a problem since Snicket finds it difficult doing precisely that. He was supposed to meet his contact in the city. Instead, he finds himself whisked away to the country to a dying town called Stain'd-by-the-Sea. Once a bustling harbor, the town's water was removed leaving behind a creepy seaweed forest and an ink business that won't be around much longer. With his incompetent mentor S. Theodora Markson he's there to solve the mystery of a stolen statue. Never mind that the statue wasn't stolen, its owners don't care who has it, and their client isn't even a real person. When Snicket finds a girl looking for her father and learns the name of the insidious Hangfire things start to get interesting, not to mention dangerous. Can multiple mysteries be solved even if you keep following the wrong paths? Snicket's about to find out.
What is more dangerous: Evil or stupidity? It's a trick question since there's nothing "or" about it. If there's one lesson to be gleaned from the Snicket universe, it is that while evil is undesirable, stupidity is downright damaging. Many is the Series of Unfortunate Events book that would show clear as crystal that while stupid and ignorant people may not necessarily be evil in and of themselves, they do more to aid in evil than any routine bad guy ever could hope for. In All the Wrong Questions the adults in charge are still inane, but at least the kids have a bit of autonomy from them. Our hero, the young Snicket, is still omnipotent to a certain degree, and only cares to share personal information with the reader when the plot requires that he do so. And because the book is a mystery, he's almost required to move about at will. He just happens to be moving between stupid people much of the time.
Of course the trouble with having Lemony himself as your protagonist is that the guy is infamous for never giving you good news. If adult Snicket is the kind of guy who warns off readers (in a voice that I've always connected to Ben Stein) because of his own sad worldview, reading this series means that we are going to see failure at work. We saw failure at work with the Baudelaires but with them it was always the fault of the universe using them as punching bags more than their own inadequacies. That means that the author's trick with this book is to keep it from disintegrating into depression even as its hero ultimately screws up (yet seems to be doing the right thing the whole time). How do you pull this dichotomy off? Humor. Thank god for humor. Because like other post-modern children's mysteries (Mac Barnett's The Brixton Brothers, most notably) being funny is the key to simultaneously referencing old mystery tropes while commenting on them.
I always had a certain amount of difficulty figuring out how exactly to describe A Series of Unfortunate Events. The term "Gothic" just didn't quite cut it. PoMo Gothic, maybe. Or Meta-Gothic. Dunno. The All the Wrong Questions series makes it much easier on me. This book is noir. Noiry noir. Noiry noirish noirable noir. As if to confirm this the author drops in names like Dashiell and Mitchum, which like all of Snicket's jokes will fly over the heads of all the child readers and 82.5% of the adult readers as well (I kept a tally for a while of the references I knew that I myself was not getting, then just sort of stopped after a while). There are dames, or at least the 12-year-old equivalent of dames. There are Girl Fridays. There are mistaken identities and creepy abandoned buildings. There are also butlers who do things, but that's more of a drawing room murder mystery genre trope, so we're going to disregard it here.
Let us talk Seth. The man comes to fill the shoes left by Brett Helquist. He's a clever choice since there is nothing even slightly Helquistian to this comic legend. This is, to the best of my knowledge Seth's first work for children, though there may well be some obscure Canadian work of juvenilia in his past that I've missed. His work on the cover is remarkable in and of itself, but in the book he works primarily in chapter headings and the occasional full-page layout. The author must have relayed to Mr. Seth what images to do sometimes because there is a picture at the beginning and a picture at the end that continue the story above and beyond the written portions. As for the spreads inside, Seth does an admirable job of ever concealing young Snicket's face. He also lends a funny lightness to the proceedings, not something I would have expected walking into the novel.
There is a passage in the book where Snicket reflects on his life that just kills me. It comes a quarter of the way through the novel and is the clearest indication to the reader that the action in this novel happened a long time ago. It goes on for a while until finally ending with, "Stretched out in front of me was my time as an adult, and then a skeleton, and then nothing except perhaps a few books on a few shelves." Put another way, this isn't your average mystery novel for kids. It's not even your average Lemony Snicket novel. It is what it is, the first part in a new series containing a familiar character that need not be previously known to readers. I have no idea if kids will gravitate towards it, but if you've a hankering to recommend a beautifully written if uncommon mystery to kids that ask for that sort of thing (and they do, man, they do) hand this over. Worse case scenario, they don't like it. Best case scenario it blows their little minds. Blew mine anyway. Good stuff.
For ages 9-12.
To be a success in Snicket's line of work it's important to know how to ask the right questions. And this is a problem since Snicket finds it difficult doing precisely that. He was supposed to meet his contact in the city. Instead, he finds himself whisked away to the country to a dying town called Stain'd-by-the-Sea. Once a bustling harbor, the town's water was removed leaving behind a creepy seaweed forest and an ink business that won't be around much longer. With his incompetent mentor S. Theodora Markson he's there to solve the mystery of a stolen statue. Never mind that the statue wasn't stolen, its owners don't care who has it, and their client isn't even a real person. When Snicket finds a girl looking for her father and learns the name of the insidious Hangfire things start to get interesting, not to mention dangerous. Can multiple mysteries be solved even if you keep following the wrong paths? Snicket's about to find out.
What is more dangerous: Evil or stupidity? It's a trick question since there's nothing "or" about it. If there's one lesson to be gleaned from the Snicket universe, it is that while evil is undesirable, stupidity is downright damaging. Many is the Series of Unfortunate Events book that would show clear as crystal that while stupid and ignorant people may not necessarily be evil in and of themselves, they do more to aid in evil than any routine bad guy ever could hope for. In All the Wrong Questions the adults in charge are still inane, but at least the kids have a bit of autonomy from them. Our hero, the young Snicket, is still omnipotent to a certain degree, and only cares to share personal information with the reader when the plot requires that he do so. And because the book is a mystery, he's almost required to move about at will. He just happens to be moving between stupid people much of the time.
Of course the trouble with having Lemony himself as your protagonist is that the guy is infamous for never giving you good news. If adult Snicket is the kind of guy who warns off readers (in a voice that I've always connected to Ben Stein) because of his own sad worldview, reading this series means that we are going to see failure at work. We saw failure at work with the Baudelaires but with them it was always the fault of the universe using them as punching bags more than their own inadequacies. That means that the author's trick with this book is to keep it from disintegrating into depression even as its hero ultimately screws up (yet seems to be doing the right thing the whole time). How do you pull this dichotomy off? Humor. Thank god for humor. Because like other post-modern children's mysteries (Mac Barnett's The Brixton Brothers, most notably) being funny is the key to simultaneously referencing old mystery tropes while commenting on them.
I always had a certain amount of difficulty figuring out how exactly to describe A Series of Unfortunate Events. The term "Gothic" just didn't quite cut it. PoMo Gothic, maybe. Or Meta-Gothic. Dunno. The All the Wrong Questions series makes it much easier on me. This book is noir. Noiry noir. Noiry noirish noirable noir. As if to confirm this the author drops in names like Dashiell and Mitchum, which like all of Snicket's jokes will fly over the heads of all the child readers and 82.5% of the adult readers as well (I kept a tally for a while of the references I knew that I myself was not getting, then just sort of stopped after a while). There are dames, or at least the 12-year-old equivalent of dames. There are Girl Fridays. There are mistaken identities and creepy abandoned buildings. There are also butlers who do things, but that's more of a drawing room murder mystery genre trope, so we're going to disregard it here.
Let us talk Seth. The man comes to fill the shoes left by Brett Helquist. He's a clever choice since there is nothing even slightly Helquistian to this comic legend. This is, to the best of my knowledge Seth's first work for children, though there may well be some obscure Canadian work of juvenilia in his past that I've missed. His work on the cover is remarkable in and of itself, but in the book he works primarily in chapter headings and the occasional full-page layout. The author must have relayed to Mr. Seth what images to do sometimes because there is a picture at the beginning and a picture at the end that continue the story above and beyond the written portions. As for the spreads inside, Seth does an admirable job of ever concealing young Snicket's face. He also lends a funny lightness to the proceedings, not something I would have expected walking into the novel.
There is a passage in the book where Snicket reflects on his life that just kills me. It comes a quarter of the way through the novel and is the clearest indication to the reader that the action in this novel happened a long time ago. It goes on for a while until finally ending with, "Stretched out in front of me was my time as an adult, and then a skeleton, and then nothing except perhaps a few books on a few shelves." Put another way, this isn't your average mystery novel for kids. It's not even your average Lemony Snicket novel. It is what it is, the first part in a new series containing a familiar character that need not be previously known to readers. I have no idea if kids will gravitate towards it, but if you've a hankering to recommend a beautifully written if uncommon mystery to kids that ask for that sort of thing (and they do, man, they do) hand this over. Worse case scenario, they don't like it. Best case scenario it blows their little minds. Blew mine anyway. Good stuff.
For ages 9-12.
22 of 24 people found the following review helpful
By Kendra Lacy
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Lemony Snicket has always reminded me a little bit of Edward Gorey (which here means creating settings where a boy named Neville might just die of ennui (which here means boredom)) and Roald Dahl (which here means creating adult characters who act mean and stupid because that's what adults are).
His series of Unfortunate Events was immensely popular and as we all know following up one popular series of books with another is not easy. Harper Lee stopped after "To Kill a Mockingbird" which was probably a good thing. Stop while you're ahead. J.K. Rowling decided to write some more which would have only been a good idea if Harry Potter was still somehow involved.
But Lemony Snicket, in his new book "Who Could That Be at This Hour?" may have broken the trend. I found this book very readable (which here means I couldn't put it down) and his characters and setting perhaps more relatable and enjoyable than anything else he has previously written.
Dare I say that the thirteen-year-old Snicket who narrates the book is far more optimistic, caring and kind than his adult persona that narrates the Series of Unfortunate Events? Dare I say that this series may even hold more promise than his last?
There were times when this book reminded me of a twisted version of Encyclopedia Brown with Lemony as Brown and his lighthouse keeper's daughter friend Moxie as Encyclopedia Brown's trusty sidekick Sally. There was even a Bugs Meeny character. I loved Encyclopedia Brown and that this book reminded me of him is a good thing.
There were also times when Lemony reminded me of a young Sherlock Holmes, given his own Irene Adler and his own Baker Street Irregulars in the form of taxi cab enthusiasts Pip and Squeak.
All good things.
And good things make me want to read more.
His series of Unfortunate Events was immensely popular and as we all know following up one popular series of books with another is not easy. Harper Lee stopped after "To Kill a Mockingbird" which was probably a good thing. Stop while you're ahead. J.K. Rowling decided to write some more which would have only been a good idea if Harry Potter was still somehow involved.
But Lemony Snicket, in his new book "Who Could That Be at This Hour?" may have broken the trend. I found this book very readable (which here means I couldn't put it down) and his characters and setting perhaps more relatable and enjoyable than anything else he has previously written.
Dare I say that the thirteen-year-old Snicket who narrates the book is far more optimistic, caring and kind than his adult persona that narrates the Series of Unfortunate Events? Dare I say that this series may even hold more promise than his last?
There were times when this book reminded me of a twisted version of Encyclopedia Brown with Lemony as Brown and his lighthouse keeper's daughter friend Moxie as Encyclopedia Brown's trusty sidekick Sally. There was even a Bugs Meeny character. I loved Encyclopedia Brown and that this book reminded me of him is a good thing.
There were also times when Lemony reminded me of a young Sherlock Holmes, given his own Irene Adler and his own Baker Street Irregulars in the form of taxi cab enthusiasts Pip and Squeak.
All good things.
And good things make me want to read more.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I'm not a kid who grew up with and loved Lemony Snicket's Series/Unfortunate Events...I'm a 40-something who loved them...I was so happy to learn a new series was here...it has all the charm of the previous series and even more...adults are still the inmates running the asylum and from S. Theodora Markson to the "Officers Mitchum" to others, "Snicket" (Daniel Handler) has once again created some absurd, ridiculous, and unforgettable characters. The first appearance of "word which here means..." warmed my heart and soul considerably. There are some true giggle-out-loud moments but I won;t give them away in the review. You HAVE to read the book! In Ellington Feint he has drawn the best femme fatale since Jessica Rabbit and in Moxie Mallahan a sweet and intrepid sidekick. It's a genius of Handler that he captures the innocence and angst of affection between and among teens so well. Can;t wait for book #2. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who could that be at this hour?
5 star. I picked this rating because it is such an action packed book , and anyone that likes that type of book you should read it.
Published 1 day ago by Amanda Reed
4.0 out of 5 stars
So Ridiculous it's Good
Honestly I don't know if you can say this is 4 stars good or not... but Snicket has a way of writing these books that are so wackadoo that you have to know what happens next... Read more
Published 3 days ago by RayGun
4.0 out of 5 stars
BEST BOOK EVER
I really enjoyed "Who could that be at this hour?" It was a very complicated book that makes you think, I would not suggest this book if you want to read a happy book, or at least... Read more
Published 3 days ago by Shannon
4.0 out of 5 stars
Would recommend
AS advertised. Price was right, arrived timely. Not much else to say other than I would recommend to others. Good story BTW.
Published 9 days ago by JDM
1.0 out of 5 stars
Boo
This book is horrible. I didn't feel as I do when I read other books. Never read this book everyone.
Published 11 days ago by Pam Larcom
5.0 out of 5 stars
AWESOME
That was amazing! I HAVE to get it on my device! It rocks its awesome its amazing its cool its great!
Published 13 days ago by Eli
4.0 out of 5 stars
I just love Lemony Snicket
I loved the Unfortunate Events series through elementary and middle school and was eager to see how this book compared now that I am a freshman in college. I was not disappointed. Read more
Published 13 days ago by Suzanna Edwards
5.0 out of 5 stars
Yayy!
What can I say, Lemony Snicket is simply the best! I read his books with my children when they were young and found that I enjoyed them as much or more than they did. Read more
Published 20 days ago by Victoria Batson
3.0 out of 5 stars
MINXEL BUTTER
Way too short it's a fricking 70 pages usually I love lemony snickits mysterious and dark side I still did in this book but I wish there's just not enough action in this book
Published 23 days ago by Design studio
5.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful!
Nice book, full of mystery and twists and turns. Another snicket masterpiece! I would recommend this to any fans of "A Series of Unfortunate Events"
Published 1 month ago by James Stephen Lloyd Poole
