The Hostile Hospital by Daniel Handler
While hospitals are meant to be places of healing and aid, it's not unusual for their patients to come out feeling somewhat hostile.
This is especially true for people who arrive at the hospital in a van filled with interminably cheerful and useless volunteers while fleeing from a Vile Village of crow devotees who want to execute you on trumped-up murder charges. You might feel even more hostile if you were drafted into a filing job in which you were forbidden to read anything (even the file on you) and then an actor disguised your siblings as surgeons and tried to force them to saw your head off.
Such is the life of Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire.
In The Hostile Hospital, an installment of Lemony Snicket's The Series of Unfortunate Events, the Baudelaires are no longer being pushed from place to place by Mr. Poe. In fact, they can't even get a hold of Mr. Poe, though they do send him a telegram pleading for help. Now they're on the run as the Daily Punctilio is declaring them to be murderers. Unfortunately for them, the man their accused of murdering is still very much alive and still trying to kill them.
While earlier books had Violet and Sunny teamed up to try to rescue Klaus, this one takes Violet away from her younger siblings and it is up to them to try to rescue her. It helps that Sunny is maturing and it is even possible for readers to decipher some of her speech.
Like the other books, The Hostile Hospital introduces its share of amusing and quirky characters. The Volunteers Fighting Disease are a group of guitar-playing hippies who think that they can heal people by thinking happy thoughts. Their leader says, "If you picture something, it makes it so." The orphans are rightly skeptical of his optimistic visioning. They are equally skeptical of the group's motto: No News is Good News.
Babs, the Human Resources Director, never speaks directly to anyone, but only through a speaker. She informs the children that most important work that the half-finished hospital does is not healing people, but paperwork.
Lemony Snicket also continues to sneak in peculiar facts and histories. This one gives a history of the knife and information about rust and how it comes about.
There is a fair amount of development in this book. Not only are the orphans no longer dependent in any way on Mr. Poe, but they also begin to use disguises themselves as a way to keep themselves alive. They also start facing moral dilemmas. They find themselves doing things that are wrong to escape their fates and have to question themselves about what makes them different from Olaf and his crew.
However, their moral fiber does shine through, especially when Klaus argues with one of Olaf's henchmen that "It doesn't take courage to kill someone. It takes a severe lack of moral stamina."
