Disguised as hotel concierges, the Baudelaire orphans must tell volunteers from villains at the Hotel Denouement before a gathering storm breaks
A hotel arranged like a library
In the twelfth book of A Series of Unfortunate Events, Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire arrive at the Hotel Denouement, a vast building whose rooms are organized according to the Dewey Decimal System. Disguised as concierges, they have been asked to observe the guests and report who is a friend and who is an enemy. The trouble is that the hotel is run by identical managers, Frank and Ernest, and nobody can tell which one is which.
Who will enjoy it
Readers who have followed the Baudelaires this far and are ready for the series to turn darker, stranger and more morally complicated.
What you will get
The Baudelaires go undercover in a hotel arranged like a library, where heroes and villains are harder than ever to tell apart.
The Penultimate Peril Facts: Pages, Genre and Setting
Genre
Children’s Books · Series of Unfortunate Events · Hotel mystery · Dark comedy
Length
353 pages · ≈ 10 h
More about this book
Everyone seems to be checking in at once. Count Olaf arrives with his troupe, old allies from earlier books reappear, and a court of judges prepares to hold a trial in the lobby. The children carry out their assignments floor by floor, delivering towels, ringing bells and trying to read the guests, while Sunny proves to be an increasingly confident cook in the hotel kitchen.
This is the book where the series stops pretending the line between good and bad is clear. The children are pushed into decisions that hurt people, and the narrator does not let them off the hook. The final chapters are frantic and unsettling, with a death that happens almost by accident and a fire that the Baudelaires themselves help start. Snicket's dry wordplay is still there, but it is quieter, and the questions he asks are genuinely hard for young readers and adults alike.
Younger fans may find the ending heavier than the cheerful misery of the earlier volumes, so it is worth reading with The End close at hand. For everyone else, it is one of the most ambitious entries in the series. About 353 pages in the HarperCollins hardcover.
The Grim Grotto
The Slippery Slope
The Carnivorous Carnival
The Bad Beginning
The Wide Window
Nate the Great
The Miserable Mill
The Ersatz Elevator
Old Yeller
The Hostile Hospital
The Austere Academy
The Vile Village