Rowling's next Harry Potter book, which is due to hit bookstores, I think, in 2008). There's been a rather longish wait for The Carnivorous Carnival to appear (not, however, as long as the one for J.K.

but that's another story for a different day.) (Don't let me kid you, my childhood wasn't all gothic horror - I also had a poster of Barry Manilow. I probably would have replaced that bedroom poster of Joan of Arc burning at the stake with one of the Baudelaire orphans in the clutches of evil Count Olaf.

If I'd had the Snicket books 30 years ago, they would have been my gospel of gloom. Daniel Handler) has created a world conspicuously void of sunshine, lollipops and puppy dogs and even if the occasional lollipop does turn up, it's likely to have a coating of lint-fuzz from the pocket of the winter coat you last wore in April (precisely the day when you stuffed the half-sucked sucker into the pocket, thinking you'd save it for later that night). The kids attract bad luck like black shirts attract dandruff and I, for one, appreciate the militantly anti-Pollyanna stance. The kid in me loves the fact that nothing good ever happens to Snicket's trio of plucky orphans: Violet, Klaus and Sunny Baudelaire, left parentless thanks to a house fire prior to the opening of Book One. The Carnivorous Carnival: Book 9 in a Series of Unfortunate EventsĮven after reading nine volumes of Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, I'm still trying to figure out which part of me enjoys the books the most: the nine-year-old inner child who had an unnatural predilection for morbidity (for example, one of my favorite Sunday School lessons was the Crucifixion, particularly when they got to the part with the crown of thorns and the agony of the nails), or the 39-year-old outer child who still prefers the glum and gloomy (clouds dark with rain, Bergman films, picking my cuticles 'til they bleed - that sort of thing). Review | The Carnivorous Carnival by Lemony Snicket

The series of unfortunate events book 9