The Baudelaire orphans face even more trouble in this thirteenth and final installment of A Series of Unfortunate Events, including a terrible storm, a mysterious island, and a dishonest facilitator.

I admit it: I’d been holding my breaths for months. I rushed to the bookstore the day it was released. I’m a little embarrassed to say it, but it’s true: I’m an addict for Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events.

If you’ve seen the movie, you might wonder why. And—no offense, Jim Carey—but I wouldn’t blame you. The movie didn’t even come close to doing justice to Snicket’s brilliant series, but how could it? The whole point of the humor in these books is the style in which they’re written. The plays on words, the asides, the clever witticisms—these just can’t be duplicated in a movie.

But the best part about A Series of Unfortunate Events, and the reason why I couldn’t wait to read the last one, is, of course, the mystery. Mystery is always the thing that keeps readers turning pages—no matter what the genre of a book purports to be, it’s always mystery that drives the plot forward—and Snicket’s Series accomplishes this beautifully. Each installment has offered just enough clues to make you feel you know something new while always keeping you guessing about what will come next. Mystery, and its resolution, is what makes fiction so satisfying: things are confusing at first, but by The End, everything is sure to come clear.

Which is why I couldn’t wait to read the final installment of Snicket’s thirteen-book series.

I should have known better, of course. I wanted all the loose strings tied up. I wanted all the mysteries solved, all the answers given, all the solutions finished. But I can’t say I wasn’t warned. Snicket insists throughout this final book that readers who expect to have all the mysteries answered by the end of The End should just put it down now and not bother finishing. He warns that The End will not really contain the end of the story of the unfortunate Baudelaire orphans, because in real life, stories never end. “No story really has a beginning,” Snicket writes, “and…no story really has an end, as all of the world’s stories are…jumbled…with their details and secrets all heaped together so that the whole story, from beginning to end, depends on how you look at it” (288-9). He adds (in a rather glib assertion for a fiction writer) that “it is impossible to solve any mystery” (289). And so I ought to have known better than to expect the final book of the Series to answer all the questions that were raised throughout the twelve preceding books.

The theme of The End, after all, is secrets—secrets that parents keep from their children, secrets that leaders keep from their followers, secrets that bad guys know and good guys never get to find out. The fictional lives of the Baudelaire orphans contain more secrets than most people’s, but they do resemble reality in the fact that not all the secrets are ever quite explained, even at the very end of The End. For Snicket, despite his lighthearted tone and silly cleverness with words, wants to write something more than mere fiction. He wants to create something that reflects life.

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