First Quarter Book Review

Eric Pouliot
10/13/08
F Block
"The End book review."
The End by Lemony Snicket, Harper Collins Publishers, 2006. Genre: Fiction.
The End is Lemony Snicket's thirteenth and final book of the series, The Series of Unfortunate Events. The protagonists of this story are Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. Three of them are washed up on an island from a brutal storm that is inhabited by other castaways. A person named Count Olaf is also stuck on the island with the Baudelaires. Count Olaf is an evil villain who is after the large amount of money that the Baudelaire's parents left behind. Throughout the book, the three kids learn how to live on the island that is hundreds of miles away from civilization. They have to adapt to the customs of the island's facilitator, Ishmael too. They have to learn new and different things with an evil person trying to kill them on the same island.
" Like a covert mission to turn their readers into slightly dark-hued sophisticates, New York Times-Henry Alford.." I think that the quote from Henry Alford means that the people who read the book The End or other books by Lemony Snicket, learn more about the dark sides of life and other bad things.
This book reminds me of the other books that Lemony Snicket wrote. All of the other twelve books that he has written in the series have the same writing style and talk about the horrible lives that the Baudelaires live in. This book also reminds of the book, The Pearl. I think that The End and The Pearl are very similar books because Count Olaf is try to get the fortune that Violet, Klaus, and Sunny's parents left behind when they died, and the doctor and other people are also trying to get the huge pearl that Kino has found that is worth tons of money. The End and The Pearl are also very different because The End is a novel while The Pearl is a novella.
I think that the writing style of the book makes it seam redundant, depressing, and confusing. At other times is sounds pretty good because of the big words that he always uses. A part of the story that is redundant and confusing is, "The end of The End contains all these ends, and that does not depend on how you look at it, so it might be best for you to stop looking at The End before the end of The End arrives, and to stop reading The End before you read the end, as the stories that end in The End that began in The Bad Beginning are beginning to end now." (289,290) This shows that Lemony Snicket does write things that are repetitive, like end, and things that are confusing. When the writer writes things like this it makes you stop and think for a little to see what is going on or what just happened. Sometimes I like it when he does this though.
I like how the author gives each character different personalities and characteristics throughout the book. Violet, the oldest of the three, always ties her hair up with a purple ribbon so that she can think better when she makes inventions. Klaus, the chid that is in the middle, writes down notes in his commonplace notebook so he can remember things better. Klaus always carries this notebook around. Sunny, the baby of the three, likes to cook and bite on objects. Sunny bites on items when she is bored or curious. She caries around a whisk with her to cook things. She is very smart about cooking too, she can