4 out of 5

Book 2 finds Snicket writing a more complete feeling story than the first offering – meaning it doesn’t feel as reliant on the series’ building mysteries, a quality which took a few books for the ‘Unfortunate Events’ to resolve to once that had shifted into puzzle mode – but there are still some hitches to the style and setup that prevent the book from becoming edge-of-your-seat mystery.

Interestingly, the main hold-up is that the story never seems to quite start, even though the core MacGuffin – the disappearance of a local chemist – is introduced almost from the get-go via our narrator noticing a ton of ‘missing’ posters.  The statue of the Bombinating Beast which apparently called Lemony and his ‘chaperone’, S. Theodora Markson, to the town of Stain’d By the Sea for its rescue, held within its very image the sense of foreboding and dread that’s worked well in the Snicket world, which balanced pleasantly with a pre-Baudelaire bit of positivity in the first book.  That tone remains (and is a big contributor to the ‘complete’ feeling of the story, since the voice is more confident), and Snicket drops some references to the Beast in the mix, but otherwise we don’t quite get the thrillingly off-puttingly ‘things are not right’ driving notion until the tale is well under way – almost 2/3rds of the way through.  But the big hurdle of introducing VFD without naming it and sidling us into Lemony’s world of associates and apprentices has been set aside, and keeping the setting relatively intimate – locking us into this small town where every street has been walked down and almost every building explored within a few pages – allows this second volume to focus on fleshing out the characters to something more than repartee participants, bringing forth more smoothly the author’s themes of relative truth and embracing the inherent flaws – the lack of logic – in all things.  So even though Moxie and Pip and Squeak and Ellington Feint may get less page time, they feel more like real people (or children), hardened but unsoured by life in this dour town, and every exchange we read can be seen and heard in believable voices.  Fittingly, the adults become a bit more real too, which means a layer is peeled back on their cartoonishness – so Markson is still clueless and the local constables couple still helpless, but in flashes we see them as human and can appreciate our narrator’s need to work for the betterment of the world in secret…  For these people don’t mean to be buffoons, it’s just a consequence of a life, perhaps, naively led.

Excepting our villains, who are certainly evil.  Though there’s not quite a direct enemy like Hangfire in book 2 – there’s Dr. Flammarion and Nurse Dander, but they seem simply like extras to give the villain’s machinations a face and buffer his ‘Inhumane Society’ – adding to that feeling like a different mystery or focus was going to pop up around the corner any moment.

The wonderfully easter eggy book references return, but I appreciate that Lemony toned down the ‘this is the wrong question’ mantra, saving it for key moments.  It was a good gag in the first book but would definitely have been overkill used too much here.  The writing in general is as reliable tactful as ever, commodity of movement and description, pausing to detail smoking guns to us or set the mood but otherwise just staging scenes and allowing us (and the illustrations) to fill in the corners.  This unbusy writing style fits for the vacant town, but I found that the final set piece didn’t quite get the scale in the text I think it required, especially vs. the mansion from book 1.  There was also an odd nuance where Snicket would change focus within the same paragraph rather jarringly, not even really connecting a concept inbetween the sentences where the shift would occur.  I’m uncertain if this will have larger application when the series completes (tying into some theme I’m not getting) or was just a quirk that occurred when writing the book.

So you can see by my rating that I still thoroughly enjoyed the book.  Admittedly I have confidence in the author, but it helped that the world of ATWQ grew in richness exponentially between book 1 and 2, making this entry one of the more rewarding readings in all of Snicket’s writings up to this point, as it had the rare balance of playing into the series’ mysteries without letting them distract from the narrators’ thoughts and journey.