A Series of Unfortunate Events – The End

Lemony Snicket's The End is the thirteenth Baudelaire book and the last one, for 10 year olds, and it opens with three children and a villain sharing one small boat.

What happens

If your reader has got this far they know how it works. Violet invents. Klaus reads, and writes everything down in a dark blue notebook. Sunny, who is only just past being a baby, cooks.

What Sunny has to cook with, out in the middle of an empty sea, is one clay jar of plain white beans.

Count Olaf is in the boat too. He has a harpoon gun with one harpoon left in it, and a figurehead with poison spores sealed inside, and he will not stop bragging about how he has triumphed.

Snicket does his usual trick of telling you to put the book down. The story is an onion, he says. Keep peeling and your only reward is a hundred and seventy chapters of misery and a great many tears. That joke has been running since the first page of the first book and it still lands.

The tone underneath it has shifted, though. In chapter one Sunny suggests pushing Olaf overboard, and her brother and sister find they can picture doing it. They sit there wondering whether they are the sort of people who would.

Snicket then stops the story to explain the difference between a navigational compass and a moral compass, which is about as close as he ever comes to saying what all thirteen books have been for.

So this is a strange one to hand over. The comic timing is exactly as it always was. The situation is genuinely bleak, the children have done things they feel terrible about, and the questions about their own parents are getting worse rather than better.

Worth knowing before you hand it over

Some things get answered. Others deliberately do not, which infuriates some readers and delights others, and there is no telling in advance which yours will be.

It is also, obviously, the worst possible place to start. All the sadness has been earned across twelve earlier books and none of it will land without them.

What to read next

If they have wandered in at the end and want to go back and do it properly, the Baudelaires' bad beginning is here too. A grey day at Briny Beach, some terrible news, and an unbelievably awful new guardian.