The Vile Village by Daniel Handler
No one is safe from the wicked satire of Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket). Every one of the 12 books thus far in the Series of Unfortunate Events turns a satiric spotlight on some institution, person, or organization. In The Vile Village, it's Hillary Clinton's turn on the hot seat.
Mr. Poe is making yet another attempt to safely place the orphans. He finds an isolated village who want to foster the children. They say that it "takes a village to raise a child." Unfortunately for the orphans, the village's idea of "raising" means forcing the children to do all their chores.
The village itself is an odd one. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny are optimistic at first as its name carries the initials of the organization they're trying to find out more about: The Village of Fowl Devotees.
It becomes a book of crows and couplets. While the orphans are kept busy doing all the chores for the village under the direction of Hector the Handyman, they're also trying to decipher the couplets that are being found near his home, especially since they're fairly sure they are coming from the Quagmire triplets.
They're also forced to keep track of a complicated set of rules that are being enforced by Officer Lucianna.
This book marks a switch for the Baudelaire orphans, though not one that is any less frustrating. In previous books, they have tried to convince their guardians that Count Olaf is present in one disguise or another. In this book, the village claims to have caught Count Olaf. The orphans try unsuccessfully to convince them that it is not Count Olaf, but a man named Jacques Snicket.
There are several turning points in this book for the orphans, highly appropriate given that the book is the mid-point of the series. This placement marks the last time that Mr. Poe is active in their lives and in choosing their guardians. It also marks the end of having the public on their side as they are accused of a ghastly crime in this book that gets widely publicized. It also marks Klaus' 13th birthday and Sunny's first time walking.
Like the books before it, Snicket manages to sneak in various literary references. The town is devoted to its murder of crows, all of which sleep on the Nevermore Tree during the night. Olaf is disguised as Detective Dupin, which could refer either to the mathematician Pierre Charles Dupin (he discovered conjugate tangents) or his elder brother, Andre who was an advocate and politician charged with classifying the laws of France. More likely, though, it is another bow in the direction of Edgar Allan Poe who created a fictional detective named Auguste Dupin, who was the prototype for such famous detectives as Sherlock Holmes.
Once again, the siblings must decipher a code, this time in the form of the couplets that are dropped to them daily. Once they crack the code, they are able to find where the Quagmires are being hidden.
This 256-page book also provides some foreshadowing of the next book when Klaus looks through the Quagmire's notebooks and finds an advertisement for Last Chance General Store, the next stop on their journey that they make in The Hostile Hospital.
