The End: Book the Thirteenth of A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

"If you hadn’t wasted so much thought on how many times to say the end to summarize The End, maybe you could have given us a suitable end to the end of the Baudelaires’ tale. But instead we have The End and we are wishing you hadn’t reached the end of your creativity before The End."
- Michael Sullivan

Pros

• One last time to say goodbye to Violet, Klaus, Sunny and even Count Olaf (perhaps)
• The last few ingenious writing twists from a once splendid children’s storyteller
• We finally find out who Beatrice is

• An unfortunate conclusion that is unfortunate for all the wrong reasons
• An author that seems beleaguered in making it to 13 books and then bloats the last
• Too many mysteries left unsolved
• The sad feeling that The End was never meant to be the end, but instead a sad marketing tool for further tales (we dread and hope)

• The Baudelaire Orphans and Count Olaf share one last plight together on a mysterious island.
• The island "where everything eventually washes up on its shores" is inhabited by a colony with a unique link to the Baudelaires’, Olaf’s and Snicket’s past.
• In the end of The End, we still really don’t know much more about the whereabouts of the Quagmires, why the sugar bowl was so important, if one of the Baudelaires’ parents is alive, etc.

But then The Bad Beginning turned into a stale middle and the last four books before the thirteenth seemed exceptionally dreary, not only story-wise, but also creative-wise. Sure the Baudelaires world was drab, but they always had enough spark between the three of them to ignite the reader into cheering them on regardless of Snicket’s continuous forewarning that their story would end poorly. Seems he was right all along.

But it’s not because of what Snicket tells us. It’s because of what he doesn’t. He built up so many mysteries throughout the previous twelve events, and instead of revealing any of them, he leaves us with the Baudelaires on an island, the discovery of another Series of Unfortunate Events and the birth of another unfortunate orphan whose tale we’re still waiting to be told.

Seems like Snicket, in the end, wanted us to be the ultimate unfortunate ones.