Book Review: "The Penultimate Peril"

Essay by typhusJunior High, 8th grade March 2006

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The book, "The Penultimate Peril", written by Lemony Snicket is the 12 and next to last book in the series, A Series of Unfortunate Events. It a series that commonly dishes out comedy at the same time as the characters are in terrible peril. Three children, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire were orphaned in the first book by a fire that killed their loving parents, was called an accident by the media. The children were at the beach by themselves when their parent's best friend came up to them and gave them the bad news.

An evil man, Count Olaf has been after their astonishingly large fortune ever since the Baudelaire children lost their parents. Since then they have been given to guardians only to have them killed or be kicked out of their house. It is not the children's fault that their guardians died or kicked them out.

Count Olaf has used different disguises to get to the kids and trick them into giving him their fortune. The plot has gotten a lot more complicated in the last few books though. The children ran away from their guardian in the 8th book and now they disguise themselves and hold different jobs, all along trying to find out the truth of how their parents really died, or if the even are really dead...

In this book they are disguised as concierges in a hotel that is supposed to be holding a meeting of the secret society that their parents worked for, VFD. The society's name, VFD, does not have any real meaning, it is just how it is spelled. At the meeting the Baudelaires hope to go undercover and discover the truth of their parents death, what VFD means and all the questions of mysterious and unexplained things that...