The Wide Window by Daniel Handler
Given their tragic experiences in The Bad Beginning and The Reptile Room, the Baudelaire orphans might be excused if they were to start becoming fearful, suspicious, reserved, and paranoid. The readers might even understand a bit of cowardice on their part.
However, such traits would not carry well through a baker's dozen of books, so Daniel Handler arranges for them to come face-to-face with what fear can do to a person.
In The Wide Window, Violet, Klaus, and Sunny are sent to their Aunt Josephine to live. Her house is high up on a cliff, teetering on a precipice. While their Aunt Josephine is kind and wishes for no harm to the children, she too proves to be a poor guardian. First, she is frightened of everything — whether it is door knobs, ovens, or light switches. She too has experienced tragedies and it has left her a quivering mess afraid even of tragedies that seem highly remote in possibilities.
Not too surprisingly, Count Olaf makes another appearance in another disguise and tries to kidnap the three children. Aunt Josephine, like Uncle Monty before her, doesn't believe the children when they see through the Count's feeble disguise.
This installment in the series, complete with the creepy presence of Lacrymose Leeches, introduces several items that will continue to appear later in the series. This book has the first coded letter and Klaus is able to figure out how to decipher it despite never being taught the method. There is a revelation of other deaths, deaths similar in many ways to their parents' death. It also hints that their parents may have been involved in some rather mysterious work.
Like the two books that came before this, the dour Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler) entertains with his dire warnings and woeful narration. He handily engages a vocabulary above the typical level of his reader but does so in such a way that they are easily able to follow it.
Handler is especially expert at creating new quirky characters, fully individual and engaging to read about. Uncle Monty had his obsession with reptiles, for Aunt Josephine, the obsession is with grammar. In the 2004 Jim Carrey movie, A Series of Unfortunate Events, Aunt Josephine was played beautifully by Meryl Streep.
Book the Third, The Wide Window, continues the traditions of the first two books and begins to reveal that there is more to the series than previously thought.
