My Recommendation: Read them back-to-back. They’re short enough that you can get through the first three or four pretty quickly. It feels like the story is coming together and going to actually start making sense and will engage me more now.

My Response: I'm starting to appreciate these more. Maybe I'm in a better place mentally, but this batch (The Miserable Mill, The Austere Academy and The Ersatz Elevator) weren't quite as draining as the first three (The Bad Beginning, The Reptile Room and The Wide Window).

We once again join the Baudelaire orphans as they are about to meet their new guardian and of course it's going to be horrible, that's a given. But what I wasn't expecting was how much this book would sort of set me off. I mean I knew it would because of the other books in the series. Snicket is using these books to talk about things we don't talk about anymore: child marriage, child labor, abandonment and neglect. It's still a lot to take in but looking at it through this lens has really helped me appreciate the books a lot more than I originally did.

Click here to continue reading on my blog The Oddness of Moving Things.