A review by the_gandy_man
The Miserable Mill by Lemony Snicket

3.5

I like how this book changes things up a little bit.

Klaus is more of a plot device than a character for most of the book, forcing Violet to solve things on her own. She has to decipher a complicated book, and then at the end Klaus has to invent something. I like how that shows how they've learned from each other. Count Olaf plays a much less direct role in this book. Orwell is a weird character. We don't really get to know who she is. Is she an old friend of Olaf, or did he just come to town and seduce her or something? And then the Foreman is obviously an Olaf goon but the Baudelaires never really consider that. The whole villain situation is a bit awkward in this book.

I like the hypnosis stuff. It's interesting and scary. It's a fun puzzle to figure out what the trigger word is, and it's fun that the reader can try to figure it out too. There's some wacky moments, especially towards the end with Sunny's sword fight and Klaus' debarker-gum fishing rod, which I like and I think do a good job of gently pushing the limit of what is plausible in this world.

This book breaks away from the pattern, but not too much. I think it's a little messy, but there's enough cool stuff to continue the trend of each book being better than the last.