"We're not in your clutches. We just happen to be standing in the same room."

I guess I can only talk about nerdy things in here now. At any rate, no thanks to those jerks at Fully Booked, I finally managed to get a hold of A Series of Unfortunate Events Book the Twelfth: The Penultimate Peril.

MOST DEPRESSING INSTALLMENT EVER.

After her brief but memorable appearance at the end of the last book, I was practically ready to have Kit Snicket's babies, but I guess she didn't need any help with that after all! First chapter, she's driving a taxi like a TOTAL BADASS while "distraught and pregnant". Second chapter, she proves she's a true Snicket by getting all weepy and declaring that Things Will Turn Out Badly, and never answering any questions. Then she completely disappears for the rest of the book, with only vague references to secret missions and waterskiing! Weep.

Then the Baudelaires kill her baby's Daddy. Way to go, Baudelaires! >___< (Though a guy getting skewered with a harpoon gun gave me flashes of nostalgia for League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.)

Then the Baudelaires start loading up on the existential angst. "Are we good people who are forced to do bad things for the greater good, or does doing bad things make us bad people??? OH NOES" I'd thought that whole arc of their descent into questionable morality had been resolved in The Slippery Slope, but I guess I was wrong. I always found this to be the truly depressing theme in series. It's one thing to have a theme like "Bad things happen to good people and cannot be avoided"; but "Misfortune can turn good people into bad people, and even the noblest intentions are useless"? Now that's bleak. -____-

All those "Are you who I think you are?" bits, the Baudelaires should have answered "This is who we are." (V.F.D. = the Millennium Group, totally)

And I thought this book was supposed to be the unraveling of all the mysteries of the series? But...
BIG MYSTERY #1: What is Lemony Snicket's connection with the Baudelaires? -- still unknown.
BIG MYSTERY #2: Who is this Beatrice chick? -- still unknown (though there are continued references to the Baudelaire parents, and Papa Baudelaire's name is revealed to be Bertrand... hmm...)
BIG MYSTERY #3: What's in the Sugar Bowl? -- still unknown. (Maybe this will turn out to be like the briefcase in Pulp Fiction.)
And so on and so forth. In fact, when I think about it, the only mystery that seems to have been solved in this book is how Olaf managed to track the Baudelaires down every single time. And I have to say, this wasn't exactly the most pressing one in my mind.

And various new mysteries were introduced. Did the Baudelaire parents kill Olaf's parents? Was the mysterious taxi driver supposed to be Lemony Snicket? It said that his face could not be seen, and the only reason for his face to be hidden would be either A) he's someone the Baudelaires know and whose face they would recognize if they saw it, or B) he's a character whose distinguishing feature is the fact that his face is never seen. But he's described smoking a cigarette, which seems kind of un-Lemony-ish given the negative things he's said about smoking in some of the previous books. So I dunno.

Also, Snicket mentions that if they'd gone with the mysterious taxi driver this would not have been their second-to-last peril, and they'd have encountered enough misfortune to fill up thirteen more books; but he doesn't know if it would have been better for them or not. Which to me seems to strongly suggest that in the last book they either:
A) die
B) spend the rest of their lives in prison
C) get marooned on an island with those guys from Lost

.....Aaaanyway. Kit rules. So does Sunny, except she's kinda scary now. And it's strangely heartwarming, in a disturbing way, how the Baudelaires and Olaf kind of team up in the end. I guess we'll see.