For Beatrice - 
 Summer without you is as cold as winter. 
 Winter without you is even colder. 
 The Vile Village began to bend the mold Snicket had created for this series, and I think this book begins to break it. Mr. Poe isn't in it at all (which is just fine with me), there's no adult caretaker, and the kids are on their own. I'm really liking the way this is turning out. 
 Things take a more violent turn when Klaus finds himself standing over his sister Violet with a curved, rusty, serrated knife in his hands and the expectation that he's to use it to cut off her head in front of an audience! 
 Snicket's witticisms are in full force and make the read as enjoyable as ever. I get as much out of the asides as I get out of the story itself. He's also doing a lot of foreshadowing and crafting a nice mystery. I hope it gets solved. 
 I'm going to use the rest of this space to sing praises to Daniel Handler. (Lemony Snicket is DH's pseudonym). I don't think I've mentioned the obscure references or Easter eggs the author drops all throughout the books before, so I'll do it here. I'm sure I miss a ton of these, but I appreciate every one I find, and this is one of the reasons I'm loving these books. One of the reasons I'm able to gloss over some of the more annoying factors in his writing so easily is because I know more of these gems are on the way. 
 I'll use part of chapter eight as a case in point. Klaus and Sunny are looking for their sister in the hospital, and decide to go room by room since her name isn't on any of the patient lists. Along the way they find a man named Bernard Rieux with a nasty, hacking cough in the Plague Ward (The Plague), a woman named Cynthia Vane with a toothache (I'm assuming The Vane Sisters, though I'm unfamiliar with that one), Jonah Mapple who is seasick (Moby-Dick; or, The Whale), Charley Anderson who has injured himself in an accident (The Big Money maybe? I don't know about this one), Clarissa Dalloway "who did not seem to have anything wrong with her but was staring sadly out the window" (Mrs. Dalloway), and Emma Bovary who had food poisoning (Madame Bovary). This kind of stuff is peppered all throughout these books. 
 And that brings me to Sunny's words. She's the baby and speaks only single words, or makes nonsense sounds that only her siblings can understand. However, a lot of these nonsense sounds are actually foreign words, references to other literary works, or anything really, or have roots that put her sentences in context. Some are easy to figure out: 
 "Alias," Sunny said, which meant "Maybe she's listed under a different name." 
 Pretty self-explanatory. But then you come across ones like the following. The kids are discussing which of Count Olaf's associates might be using an alias they found on a piece of paper. They discount the hook handed man and the bald man, but think it could be one of the white-faced women... 
 "Orlando!" Sunny said, which meant "Or the one who looks like neither a man nor a woman." 
 Orlando is a book by Virginia Woolf about a man who has a sex change, so you can see the connection. 
 At one point the kids are sending a telegram to Mr. Poe. Klaus translates to the others as he sends. 
 "To: Mr. Poe at Mulctuary Money Management," Klaus said. "From: Violet, Klaus, and Sunny Baudelaire. Please do not believe the story about us printed in The Daily Punctilio STOP. Count Olaf is not really dead, and we did not really murder him STOP!" 
 "Arrete?" Sunny asked. 
 "'STOP' is the code for the end of a sentence," Klaus explained. 
 And "arrete" is "stop" in French. While I'm at it, I'll point out a couple of things in Klaus' missive. The name of the paper is The Daily Punctilio, and it's famous for getting every detail wrong though the adults in this silly world lap it all up anyway and take it as gospel. Punctilious is defined as "showing great attention to detail." You have to go to the unabridged to get Mulctuary which means imposing a fine. A bank makes money by imposing fines, of course, but that's hardly what one would want to advertise in its name. Oh what fun! 
 I wonder how much time Daniel Handler spends doing research to throw these kinds of things into his work? French isn't the only foreign language he uses, and Virginia Woolf isn't the only author mentioned. (The fact that I just happened to pull out two of hers is a coincidence.) Or maybe he's just a genius and remembers everything he's ever read, so he just plucks these things out of his head as he goes along. Regardless, I'm impressed. 
 Fun things are even put into the illustrations at the start of some chapters! Chapter 11 is the one where Klaus is supposed to be decapitating his sister in front of the audience. Here's the picture for that one (credit to illustrator Brett Helquist): 
 It may be hard to see on here, but near the top row there's a person with a heart shaped balloon in front of her just to the right of the bearded man with his arm up. I assume it's a woman because it has to be a reference to a tricoteuse, which were the women spectators who knitted during the guillotine executions during the French Revolution's Reign of Terror. Maybe the woman's name is even Madam Defarge!? How cool would that be!? Alas, it's not in the text, though; just the illustration. 
 So there's my shout-out to to Lemony's reference prowess. Well done, good sir, and thank you. I wish I had sense enough to catch all of them. 
 Author's Bio: 
 Lemony Snicket is widely regarded as one of the most difficult children's authors to capture and imprison. Recently, he had to give up on his hobbies due to laws regarding musical performances in mountainous terrain. Most things written about him are not true, but this is.