In The Bad Beginning, things, well, begin badly for the three Baudelaire orphans. And sadly, events only worsen in The Reptile Room. In the third in Lemony Snicket's Series of Unfortunate Events, there is still no hope on the horizon for these poor children. Their adventures are exciting and memorable, but, as the author points out, "exciting and memorable like being chased by a werewolf through a field of thorny bushes at midnight with nobody around to help you."

This story begins when the orphans are being escorted by the well-meaning Mr. Poe to yet another distant relative who has agreed to take them in since their parents were killed in a horrible fire. Aunt Josephine, their new guardian, is their second cousin's sister-in-law, and she is afraid of everything. Her house (perched precariously on a cliff above Lake Lachrymose) is freezing because she is afraid of the radiator exploding, she eats cold cucumber soup because she's afraid of the stove, and she doesn't answer the telephone due to potential electrocution dangers. Her greatest joy in life is grammar, however, and when it comes to the proper use of the English language, she is fearless.

But just when she should be the most fearful—when Count Olaf creeps his way back to find the Baudelaire orphans and steal their fortune—she somehow lets her guard down. Once again, it is up to Violet, Klaus, and Sunny to get themselves out of danger. Will they succeed? We haven't the stomach to tell you. (Ages 9 to 12) —Karin Snelson

Young readers adventure story about intelligent and resourceful children at Baudelaires boarding school & their adventures with: snapping crabs, punishments, dripping fungus, exams, violin recitals and the metric system.

Fans of Lemony Snicket's wonderful Series of Unfortunate Events won't be surprised to find that in the sixth installment the three Baudelaire orphans' new home proves to be something of a mixed bag. As our ever sad but helpful narrator states, "Although 'a mixed bag' sometimes refers to a plastic bag that has been stirred in a bowl, more often it is used to describe a situation that has both good parts and bad parts. An afternoon at the movie theater, for instance, would be a mixed bag if your favorite movie were showing, but if you had to eat gravel instead of popcorn. A trip to the zoo would be a very mixed bag if the weather were beautiful, but all of the man-and woman-eating lions were running around loose." And so it is for the bad-luck Baudelaires. Their fancy new 71-bedroom home on 667 Dark Avenue is inhabited by Esmé Gigi Geniveve Squalor (the city's sixth most important financial advisor), and her kindly husband, Jerome, who doesn't like to argue. Esmé is obsessed by the trends du jour (orphans are "in"), and because elevators are "out," Sunny, Violet, and Klaus have to trudge up 66 flights of stairs to reach the Squalors' penthouse apartment. (Other unfortunate trends include pinstripe suits, aqueous martinis—water with a faint olive-y taste—parsley soda, and ocean decorations.)

As the book begins, the Baudelaires are not only frightened in anticipation of their next (inevitable) encounter with the evil, moneygrubbing Count Olaf but they are also mourning the disappearance of their dear new friends from The Austere Academy, the Quagmires. It doesn't take long for Olaf to show up in another of his horrific disguises... but if he is on Dark Avenue, what has he done with the Quagmires? Once again, the resourceful orphans use their unique talents (Violet's inventions, Klaus's research skills, and the infant Sunny's strong teeth) in a fruitless attempt to escape from terrible tragedy. Is there a gleam of hope for the orphans and their new friends? Most certainly not. The only thing we can really count on are more gloriously gloomy adventures in the seventh book, The Vile Village. (Ages 9 and older) —Karin Snelson

Seventh book in the 'Series of Unfortunate Events' series.

Everybody loves a carnival! Who can fail to delight in the colorful people, the unworldly spectacle, the fabulous freaks? A carnival is a place for good family fun, as long as one has a family, that is. For the Baudelaire orphans, their time at a carnival turns out to be yet another episode in a now unbearable series of unfortunate events. In fact, in this appalling ninth installment in Lemony Snicket's serial, the siblings must confront a terrible lie, an ambidextrous person, a caravan, and Chabo the wolf baby.

What would you do if you found yourself trapped in a runaway caravan hurtling down a precipitous mountain slope? Fourteen-year-old Violet, the oldest orphan of the three Baudelaires, decides to try to slow the velocity of the caravan with a drag-chute invention involving a viscous combination of blackstrap molasses, maple syrup, maraschino liqueur, peanut butter, etc. If plummeting to their death weren't scary enough, Violet and her brother Klaus have been separated from Sunny, their baby sister who is in a car headed in the opposite direction up the mountain with the "facinorous" Count Olaf, his "villainous and stylish" girlfriend Esmé Squalor, and their creepy sidekicks. Do Violet and Klaus find Sunny on the mountain? How will they survive the treacherous, snow-covered peaks with not much more than a ukulele and a bread knife, especially in the face of the "organized, ill-tempered" snow gnats? Will they finally unearth the mystery of the V.F.D.? Will they find out if one of their parents is alive after all? The suspense! As ever, the Baudelaires' unfolding tale of woe is sprinkled with Lemony Snicket's ridiculous, hilarious observations such as "Fate is like a strange, unpopular restaurant with odd waiters who bring you things you never asked for and don't always like." The tenth book in The Series of Unfortunate Events takes readers through the Mortmain Mountains to the churning waters of the Stricken Stream with all the coexistent horror and silliness a Snicket fan could hope for along the way. (Ages 9 and older) —Karin Snelson

It's tough when the things that stand between you and your desired sugar bowl are a host of deadly mushrooms and an uncomfortable diving suit. The unlucky Baudelaire orphans find themselves in deep (once again) in this eleventh book in Lemony Snicket's odd-and-full-of-woe-but-quite-funny Series of Unfortunate Events. In The Grim Grotto, the siblings find themselves headed down Stricken Stream on a broken toboggan when they are spotted by the submarine Queequeg, carrying Captain Widdershins, his somewhat volatile stepdaughter Fiona, and optimistic Phil from Lucky Smells Lumbermill. The adventures that follow as the crew tries to get to the aforementioned sugar bowl before Count Olaf are so horrible that the narrator inserts factual information about the water cycle so that readers will get bored and stop reading the book. It doesn't work. As per usual, readers will want to soak up every awf! ul detail and follow the Baudelaires all the way back to the place we first met them—Briny Beach. (Ages 9 and older) —Karin Snelson

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An Interview with Lemony Snicket
Lemony Snicket has captured the hearts of childen and adults alike with the hilariously gloomy series that began, of course, with The Bad Beginning. Amazon.com had a chance to question the author of this marvelously morbid and delightfully depressing series, and the communication was grim indeed. Read the cumbersome communique and see for yourself.

A Few Words from Daniel Handler
Due to the world-wide web of conspiracy which surrounds him, Lemony Snicket often communicates with the general public through his representative, Daniel Handler. We were lucky enough to hear from Daniel, and asked him the questions we ask every author, Amazon.com's The Significant Seven

Picking up from the final pages of the Pentultimate Peril, this farewell installment to the ridiculously (and deservedly!) popular A Series of Unfortunate Events places our protagonists right where we last left them: on a large, wooden boat in the middle of the ocean, trapped with their nemesis Count Olaf, who has armed himself with a helmet-full of deadly Medusoid Mycelium.

The situation quickly and—this being the Baudelaires—predictably deteriorates. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny find themselves tossed in a storm so terrible that our beloved narrator spends four pages describing how he cannot describe it. From this point on, fans of the series' smarty-pants wordplay and acrobatic narrative can rest assured that they're in for more of the same (and how) in this 368-page finale, and Daniel Handler's deadpan Snicket continues to tutor a generation in self-referential humor (including one particularly funny bit regarding three very short men carrying a large, flat piece of wood, painted to look like a living room). Snicket notes, of course, that if you read the entire series, "your only reward will be 170 chapters of misery in your library and countless tears in your eyes."

There's one big question, though, for anyone who's made it through "the thirteenth chapter of the thirteenth volume in this sad history": is the final book a fitting end? That question is probably best-answered by one of The End's most oft-repeated phrases: It depends on how you look at it. Those looking for conclusive resolution to the series' many, many mysteries may be disappointed, although some big questions do get explicit answers. Not surprisingly for a work so deliberately labyrinthine, though, even the absence of an answer can be sort of an answer—and reaction to The End can be something of a Rorschach test for readers. Or, as Lemony Snicket says, "Perhaps you don’t know yet what the end really means." —Paul Hughes

Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography is bizarre, abstruse ("a word which here means 'cryptic'"), and truly entertaining. Would you expect anything less from the mystery man behind A Series of Unfortunate Events (The Bad Beginning, The Ersatz Elevator, etc.)? Virtually every detail of the volume has Snicket's indelible mark, from the book jacket (reversible to help readers disguise this "extremely dangerous" and "objectionable" autobiography) to the copyright page text to the intentionally blurry and bewildering black-and-white photographs appearing throughout. An apparently false obituary for Lemony Snicket sets the stage for what turns into a series of mind-boggling bundles of coded information passed from hand to hand, gleaned from newspapers blowing through streets, pages from a journal addressed to "Dear Dairy," blueprints of ships, minutes from secret meetings, and a lot of edited and disputed commentary. The question is, do we finally discover the meaning of VFD? You know you're not going to get a straight answer. But any fan of Snicket will have a lot of fun trying. (Ages 9 and older) —Emilie Coulter

An uncensored account of one woman's experiences as a high-school math teacher, rock band pyrotechnician, rape victim counselor, Bourbon Street stripper, and five other professions chronicles a year-long and coast-to-coast journey. First serial, Esquire. Tour.

Amy Sohn lives in New York, where she writes a raunchy column for the New York Press called "Female Trouble." Her first novel features a young woman named Ariel Steiner, who lives in New York and writes a raunchy column called "Run Catch Kiss" for City Week. Any other similarities between author and creation are, no doubt, purely accidental. We first meet Ariel the summer after her graduation from college when she returns to the city, ready to resume the acting career she had as a child. Unfortunately, college not only enlarged Ariel's mind—it had a broadening effect on her body as well. "I can't send you out for any ingenue parts until you lose fifteen pounds," her agent tells her. Ariel is sure this won't take long and indulges in an optimistic fantasy about the fame and fortune that will soon come her way once she's lost the weight—an appearance in a George C. Wolfe production; a walk-on in a George Clooney film; an Oscar-winning performance in a Woody Allen movie, complete with requisite Oscar fantasy: "I'd bring my father as my date, and when Jack Palance opened the envelope and announced me as the winner, I'd run up to the stage in a strapless Chanel and they'd cut to a shot of my dad drowning in a sea of his own mucus." But until the day when Ariel Steiner becomes the third part of a Hollywood girl-triumvirate comprised of herself, Gwyneth, and Winona, a girl's got to eat; and so begins a ribaldly picaresque journey from actress wannabe to infamous New York sex columnist——"the Hester Prynne of downtown."

Run Catch Kiss is a novel that will appeal to a very specific audience—fans of Amy Sohn; young college graduates who'd like to imagine it's really this easy to achieve notoriety in a city like New York; and readers who enjoy lots of name-dropping, club-hopping, and frank descriptions of sex and other bodily functions. Sohn includes several of Ariel's columns ("Stench of a Woman," for example, or "Smutlife") as well as the letters she gets in response. In between, Ariel and her cronies and assorted one-night stands hang out in places with names like BarF and BarBarella, and drop pop references to Gen-X movies and music. Sohn delivers it all up with moxie, making up for the novel's literary weaknesses by sheer full-frontal outrageousness. —Alix Wilber

Having ovaries: unabashed, gutsy, feisty, playful, challenging, full of chutzpah, mettlesome, naughty, victorious, straight from the hip, full-flavored, outrageous, righteous, loving, inspiring, bold as brass, self-assured, self-confident, self-possessed, daring, heroic, wild, wanton, crazy, optimistic, unflappable, pushy, unstoppable, impressive, rebellious, kick-ass, carefree, having moxie, having heart, having no fear . . .

“That takes balls” are words of praise usually reserved for a man who has done something tough, fearless, and maybe a little crazy—someone who pushes the boundaries or breaks a few rules. But when it comes to hotheaded courage, impassioned activism, quirky wisdom, or bold confrontation, women have got what it takes—and then some! That Takes Ovaries! is a lively, fun, and often touching celebration of women and girls doing their thing their way:

* Kathleen, who reduced a would-be burglar to tears by lecturing him about black pride (all while standing in her underwear)
* Elaine, a sky surfer who plunges from airplanes on a 30-inch surfboard
* Rachel, a high school junior who organized 100 high school girls to take on the boys who harassed them
* Denise, a teenage cashier who faced down an irate, gun-wielding gangbanger in an inner-city fast-food joint
* Joani, a public health educator who opened the country’s first women-oriented sex-toys store
* Eva, who made the dangerous, illegal journey from Central America to the United States in order to give her children a better life

Now that takes ovaries!