Eric Skillman's Reviews > The End

Rather than review all the Series of Unfortunate Events books individually, I'll just say this here: I loved this whole series, it's blackly funny and engaging and filled with so many little tricks and gags that could only possibly work in print fiction (which is why the movie was such a disaster), that they remind you why you love reading in the first place.

For the record, around the third book I was worried that things were starting to get too formulaic and that I might be getting bored with them, but stick with it! There's some repetition, but it's all building to something bigger!

I'm putting this review on the last book of the series in order to say this: this is, seriously, one of the most brilliant and satisfying endings to a long-running series this side of The Kindly Ones. Forget Harry Potter, sooner or later some crazy christian parent with a vague grasp of metaphor is going to pick up this book and realize that this here is some hardcore questioning of Chrisian dogma—there's a garden, an apple, and a choice to be made between blissful ignorance and knowledge of good and evil in the complex world outside, and the snake is definitely the good guy—and I for one think its fantastic.