A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Wide Window

Children’s book series about three hapless orphans

After a very long time between reading book 1 and book 2 of this series, I thought I might not wait so long for the third. Plus, I’m really enjoying the Netflix adaptation (especially Patrick Warburton and Neil Patrick Harris), and I have to read the books before I watch each episode. I picked this book up recently, and in the bookplate inside it adorably has the name of the owner written, in pink cursive, as “Everyone”. I also really love these hardback editions with the deckle edges.

“The Wide Window” by Lemony Snicket is the third book of 13 in the “A Series of Unfortunate Events” collection. After the disaster that befell their previous guardian, the Baudelaire children Violet, Kraus and Sunny find themselves placed with a new guardian: Aunt Josephine. Nice enough, she lives in a precarious house atop a cliff looking over an ominous lake. However, the children soon discover that Aunt Josephine is wracked with fear and unable to do the most simple tasks such as answer a telephone for fear that she’ll be electrocuted. When Aunt Josephine befriends a suspicious looking boat captain, the children’s efforts to warn her go, unfortunately, unheeded.

The tone of this book is decidedly more grim than the previous one, and the children barely have the opportunity to get to know their new guardian before things go horribly wrong. I think I’m warming up to the series quite a lot, and I’m enjoying that the orphans are starting to waste a little less time reasoning with the litany of unreasonable adults they are faced with and are taking things into their own hands.

However, I feel that by book 3, there should probably be a slightly stronger overarching plot linking the books together. I feel that the TV adaptation has filled this gap and has provided a lot more hints and snippets of things that, as yet, remain undiscovered in the book.