100th Post!

Hurrah! I've reached my 100th blog post. Gosh, they certainly do build up quickly! Anyway, I did have a real reason for this post, not just because it made the 100th. I forget to mention I got Lemony Snicket's final unfortunate event in the series at the weekend. It's release date was Friday 13th so I battled my way into town, dodging school children and Friday traffic (why is it always worse on a Friday?) Anyway, after sitting in traffic for ages and then finally getting parking, the book shop I went to didn't have it! Can you imagine? It is a well known chain of Irish bookshops and they didn't have The End (didn't have The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly either - or, if they did, it was so well hidden I couldn't find it and I didn't feel like queuing at the desk to ask). Dispirited, I returned home. On Saturday, I braved going into town again and went to another chain of Irish bookshops which not only had both books, but they were also both discounted, and as I was paying with birthday gift tokens, it made me feel specially glad.

As for The End. I was disappointed at the title, to begin with. All the other books have clever alliteration in the title like The Bad Beginning or The Hostile Hospital. I was sure the last book would be called The Evil Ending or The Ferocious Finale, so I was disappointed before I had even opened the cover.

As for the book itself, I don't want to give away too much. It didn't end the way I hoped or imagined, so I was disappointed on one level, but on another level it was a satisfactory ending. I thought the story was slow at the beginning and lacked a lot of the charm of the other books but it did pick up near the end. I didn't like the Penultimate Peril very much, I thought Lemony (or Daniel, I should say) was mean to his characters and the Baudileres acted out of character. However, they are back on form in The End.

My only gripe about the last book, apart from the title and not including my hoped for scenarios (which was a ridiculous expectation) is one that, like many series of children's books that have gone before it (Garth Nix's seven towers series springs to mind) while the books are well written, imaginative and have good characters there is no overall plot structure to sustain the series and they just peter out at the end. I still like reading them though!