Lemony Snicket

Before the Baudelaires became orphans, before he encountered A Series of Unfortunate Events, even before the invention of Netflix, Lemony Snicket was a boy discovering the mysteries of the world. Train travel! Murder! Librarians! A Series Finale! On all other nights, the train departs from Stain'd Station and travels to the city without stopping. But not tonight. You might ask, why is this night different from all other nights? But that's the wrong question. Instead ask, where is this all heading? And what happens at the end of the line? The final book in Lemony Snicket's bestselling series, All the Wrong Questions. span

"Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?"

Avarni B

I kept walking, with nothing but solitude for company. "Solitude" is a fancy name for being all by yourself. It's not a bad name, I thought.

It doesn't matter if you never see someone again, I told myself. There are millions of people in the world, and most of them never see each other in the first place. You hoped to know Ellington Feint forever, but there's no such thing as forever, really. Everything is much shorter than that.

And every creature is simply trying to get what it wants, and to make their way through a difficult world. Do you believe that?

She gave me a smile so small and gentle that it made me lonely just to look at it. "With all due respect" she said, "you're a very strange young man, Lemony Snicket."

His voice sounded like nothing. It was perhaps a little tired, as if he had imitated so many other voices that he could no longer remember what he really sounded like.

You got curious, but just make sure that you don't get dead.

I would have to climb up the shaking, smooth wall of the train and hope there was a crack in the window somewhere to slip through. Very easy, if I were a spider.

Is it more beastly to be a murderer or to let one go free?

the answer to the question "why is this night different from all other nights?" brings this four book series to a wonderfully satisfying conclusion, while leaving you still wanting more of the snicketverse. the series slowly builds the maturity of the characters and the gravity of the situations they encounter throughout, culminating in this, the darkest and most densely plotted of all four books. 

Emmett

This was as playful, agile and witty as every single one that came before it in the series and I loved it. Snicket has a style that I'm beginning to recognise as signature, the unusual turns in his language makes him a good storyteller of mystery plots and orchestrator of perfect surprises. The ambiguous ending was a puzzle, given that this book seemed to be suited for middle graders/young adults and it left me wondering how someone of that age group would have taken to it, since I had expected something happier and more definitive and...'closed'. The greyness of it was refreshing, to say the least.

I loved catching the many literary references scattered about the course of the story. While a younger audience may be unable as yet to enjoy them, this is one of those books where a reader revisits years later and finds that it still has delights in store for her older self, that there are secret passages and author-reader nudges that experience has equipped her to see and know. Perhaps it makes her aware how much she has grown.

The only minor disappointment was that the storyline between Snicket and Kit wasn't resolved as satisfactorily as I would have liked. The intriguing style of communication adopted by the writer when attending to their relationship created the impression that there were more interesting, mysterious things going on that met the eye, and I had hoped we would see more of Kit and had anticipated the sticky situation they were in would have been unraveled and solved right in front of the reader's eyes. Alas that was not to be.

✨Tyler ✨

maybe I would have liked this more if I read it closer to the other 3. but it just doesn't scratch the ASOUE itch for me and comes off as....cartoony to me.

Jeremy Cote

Quite an entertaining story. The style of writing is just lovely.

Hope McCollum

Train travel! Murder! Librarians! A Series Finale! On all other nights, the train departs from Stain'd Station and travels to the city without stopping. But not tonight. You might ask, why is this night different from all other nights? But that's the wrong question. Instead ask, where is this all heading? And what happens at the end of the line? The final book in Lemony Snicket's bestselling series, All the Wrong Questions.

"Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?"

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