I like the narrator and illustrations. The tragedy in children’s fiction makes this series stand out. 

There definitely is a formula in this series with the children getting dropped off to an

incompetent

guardian,

Count Olaf (in disguise) finds them, no one believes the children, dramatic scene where children narrowly escape Count Olaf’s clutches, Count Olaf escapes.

This book does break the formula a little bit by using the lumber mill and Sir as a guardian, a workplace instead of a home. Violet and Klaus also have some character growth, which is nice.

That plot would’ve been just fine without the issues mentioned in my content warning notes.

It is never explained as to how the owner of the Lucky Smells Lumber Mill is related to the Baudelaire Orphans, but they are left in his care regardless. 

Every single story gets worse, and this one may  be the first time the Baudelaires see someone get killed in front of them. While they saw the body of Uncle Monty, they never saw him die. And here,

Dr. Orwell steps backwards into a lumber saw, and it instantly torn apart.

I never realized how brutal that was a child, and maybe I just blocked that part out of my mind, but I could not believe this happened. 

In this, the 4th of the Series of Unfortunate Events, I feel like we are really leaning into the absurd. The children are boarded in a lumber mill that operates in a very fanciful way. The children are supposed to earn their keep by joining the workers on the shop floor who have to slave for a ration of chewing gum for lunch, and are "paid" in discount coupons, but have no money to make purchases.

The foreman is mean, the owner is a man whose face cannot be seen through a cloud of cigar smoke, and the children meet an optimist who is maimed and an ineffectual well wisher who is imperiled as though it were a melodrama.

I have become very suspicious as to how gender is depicted in these books. Given that one of the recurring baddies is considered monstrous due to being of indeterminate gender. When our fancy-dress nemesis adopts the role of a receptionist woman, I can't help but feel like this is yet more milking laughs out of the ludicrous insistence that the protagonists call an obviously uni-browed imposter "Shirley". It should be amusing and innocent, but it just smacks of transphobia.

I get very confusing vibes from the character of the boss's partner. He's a kind man who is pushed around but doesn't seem to think this is overly problematic. He is a "partner" in name only and is lorded over by a jolly gaslighting sociopath. Part of me hopes this is a brilliant way of inspecting the normalised garbage that women are put through in marriage, but I fear that it's yet more homophobic nonsense.

As far as gore goes, this is the first of the books where there is specific horrific damage to people. In previous books there were amputees, people who died (offstage as it were) in fire, due to murder or abandonment, but in this story there are messy industrial accidents right in front of you. The idea of strapping a victim to a log in a mill has actual tension because another character has already had their leg smashed in another contrived accident. A ridiculous sword fight ends in distraction and a giant circular saw blade.  We go from absurd to messy all in one breath.

The library in this book is sparse (3 books?!) and the children learn all about the science of eyes and hypnotism. It's silly. It's garbage. It's kind of cute. Maybe this is wearing thin on me.

In this book of the series, I like how Klaus and Violet find themselves in each other’s roles

when Violet ends up being the researcher and Klaus the inventor when countering Olaf’s plan

. It just veers from the plot formula that’s being used from the previous books, even just slightly, which I like because it can get predictable if the books all follow the exact same formula. Also, having watched the show first, I expected there to be more

VFD characters and illusions throughout the story, like maybe alternate POV chapters as they follow the Baudelaires, and it was a little strange that there wasn’t, so I really like the narrator’s POV chapters and the endings when there are allusions to a person/group in the present looking back and collecting information about  these events from the past concerning the Baudelaires

.