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May 16, 2018jandt_mcmurray rated this title 4.5 out of 5 stars
The Baudelaire orphans have found a temporary place to call "home", kinda. Since leaving the village of VFD, they are, for the first time, without a designated guardian. They have snuck in to a volunteer group called VFD, Volunteers Fighting Disease. This group offers them a protection of sorts as none of the members know anybody's names - they only refer to each other as "brother" & "sister". As for shelter, they decide to take refuge in the part of the hospital that is under construction. They volunteer to work in the hospital's library of records to avoid being seen, but it turns out to be providential as they stumble upon a few unknown details of their story. The details learned here will send them on a chase to find out more but not before having to escape once again from Count Olaf & his girlfriend & partner in crime, Esme. Also for the first time in the series, the 3 siblings separated during an escape attempt. Klaus & Sunny begin their search for sister Violet only to discover that she's been caught by Count Olaf & is about to be killed in front of an audience under the ruse of being an experimental surgery. Once again, the siblings find a way to escape disaster, but now they have put themselves in possible danger in the trunk of Count Olaf's car in a desperate attempt to reveal more of the secrets in the Snicket files. I am glad to finally have a change in the story line. With no appointed guardian, the orphans are left to fend for themselves. This added an additional "question mark" to be played out before we even got to the typical "question mark" of "how would the children escape from the clutches of a terrible guardian & Count Olaf?" There was also another word puzzle to be solved as there was in "The Vile Village". I do enjoy Violet's creative inventions, but since my brain works more like Klaus', I have enjoyed the word puzzles that have been presented. And yes, I figured out the puzzle before Klaus even got all of the alphabet soup letters prepared! (Yay!) I had been getting a little slow about getting to the next book in the series since each book was basically the same just with a different guardian & location. But now that things have been shaken up a bit, I have a renewed enthusiasm to move on to the next book. On to book #9, "The Carnivorous Carnival". Age recommendation: 10 & up (threat of death by means of a real medical procedure) On a scale of 1-10 stars, I give it 9.