The Penultimate Peril

Lemony Snicket

It feels hard to believe, really, that we're almost done. The Penultimate Peril, the twelfth of the thirteen books in Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, is upon us.

After much prevaricating (a word which here means "time spent chasing a sugar bowl through various bodies of water"), the Baudelaire orphans and Kit Snicket have arrived at the Hotel Denoument. Kit's plan is to have the orphans masquerade as concierges while trying to expose the villains in attendance at the hotel, where the remaining members of VFD are to gather in a little over thirty-six hours. The orphans take to their new jobs nicely, but of course, things can't be that easy...

Perhaps the strangest thing about The Penultimate Peril is the seeming disappearance of a major plot point. (I don't want to spoil it for you, but it's something Snicket spent a number of chapters building up in a previous novel in the series.) There is a good deal of hot air released by various characters about it, then in the last fifty or so pages, it simply vanishes. Whether it will return in the final book remains to be seen, of course, but it leaves a rather jarring feeling here. Aside from that, you pretty much know what you're coming for with a Lemony Snicket book, and you get it. If you're already a fan of the series, you're going to read this anyway. If you're not, you should be starting at the beginning (a phrase which here means "starting at the beginning.")