moondust_96 's review for:

The Vile Village by Lemony Snicket

3.0

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Lemony Snicket’s The Vile Village is one of the best and worst books in the Series of Unfortunate Events series. The setting is great, in the V.F.D village where thousands of crows live alongside elders, the children’s new guardian is the whole population under the idea that ‘it takes a village to raise a child’. The Elders council runs off ridiculous contradictory rules, if any of these rules are broken then as punishment, the rulebreaker is burned at the stake. As worrying as this is, when Mr Poe lets the children choose where they want to live, they eagerly pick this town as it is named V.F.D, hoping it will answer some questions the Quagmire triplets left them. After their last V.F.D turned out to mean Very Fancy Doilies, the children are eager to believe that V.F.D stands for Village of Fowl Devotees – if only it was that easy. The local newspaper has started to report on Count Olaf’s crimes, getting his name and the story incredibly wrong, so that’s not much help for the Baudelaires, especially when they falsely publish that the orphans are dangerous murders. In this novel, we’re introduced to Lemony Snicket’s brother, Jacques who volunteered for the mysterious organisation and for some unknown reason, had the same tattoo Count Olaf – I say ‘had’ because due to this tattoo, he is falsely accused of being Olaf then is murdered. The real Olaf, I mean Omar, wait no, I mean Olaf, is disguised as Detective Duplin, a man obsessed with what is cool and what is uncool – maybe this is influenced from Esme’s passion with what is ‘in’ fashion. The children hope that their main guardian, Hector will be able to protect them from the villain, but like many of their past makeshift parents, this handyman is to afraid to speak up in front of the Elders or interfere with their plans. He has been brave enough though to stock a secret library and an inventing studio, and is near finished building a self-sustaining flying house, so I guess he is good for something. The Baudelaires are accused of murdering Jacques Snicket and are sentenced to death for their supposed crimes. While they’re locked in jail, Klaus has the saddest 13th birthday ever, but thankfully Violet has a plan to break out. By pouring a jugs worth of water down a bench onto the jail wall, they weaken the mortar holding the bricks in place and loosen enough bricks to batter their way out – my god. This is sadly not the only dreadful plot elements of this book. The Quagmires are hidden somewhere in the town, and they’re sending cryptic notes attached to the crows to ‘help’ the siblings find them. These unhelpful clues are so, so frustrating, I would have left the Quagmires simply because if they wanted to be rescued, writing unhelpful rhyming couplets isn’t the way to go about it. Apparently their notes are ambiguous because they’re worried about someone else finding them, who? Besides Olaf, no one knows who they are. Literally is it not worth putting the location in the notes, risking one person seeing it, rather than leaving the siblings struggling for so long?! When the Baudelaires finally find them, they only have a few minuets to talk and once again, Violet and Klaus don’t bother asking what VFD stands for until it is too late. Like guys, get to the point!! The friends are separated again as the Quagmires escape with Hector and the Baudelaires run from the village.