Book 1 of All the Wrong Questions

When my husband saw that I had put this book on top of my laptop – which means I’m about to write about it – he commented, I wondered when you’d get to Lemony Snicket.

I am a huge Snicket fan. I read all of A Series of Unfortunate Events as they came out – luckily my young niece was reading them at the same time, so we could geek out over them together at family gatherings. And I was fortunate enough to be present when Lemony spoke at a bookseller’s conference I was at.

And he brought his accordion and sang to us, and encouraged us all to join the chorus, the words to which I still remember vividly today: “Die, die, die, die, die, die, die. Die, die, die, die.”

Lemony Snicket is subversive.¹

He told us a story about how, at a signing, a little girl and her mother approached the table, and he asked the little girl a question and the mother jumped in and talked over the little girl, and he said something offensive to mother and the little girl’s face lit up.

Lemony Snicket knows that children don’t want – or need – to be helicoptered². They don’t need to be overprotected. That they know bad things happen in the world, and they don’t need their books to coddle them. People die in Lemony Snicket’s books. The bad guy wins, from time to time, marrying a child in one book, to secure her inheritance. And yet, even though bad things are happening to them, the children survive. They go on to fight another battle. That is what creates hope: showing children that sometimes bad things happen and life goes on.

All the Wrong Questions – the series that “Who Could That be At This Hour?” launches, is of a different stripe than The Series of Unfortunate Events. When I think of Series, I think of bright colors, a carnival atmosphere, sun and surf. Questions is more black, white, and grey, with many scenes seeming to take place in the dark or twilight, or under cloudy skies.

The main character, who is also the narrator, states on the first page of the first book, with all the jaded cynicism of a gumshoe detective, that they were twelve years old. They go on to confess that they were wrong about four important questions, the first of which is the title of this book. From there, the action expands outward to include the setting – a tea room across from a train station – and the situation – their parents about to put them on a train somewhere. A woman enters the tea room, surreptitiously drops a note in the narrator’s lap, and exits without being noticed. The note tells the narrator to sneak out the bathroom window and meet her in the alley. The narrator heads to the bathroom, retrieves a folding ladder they had hidden there, and escapes through the window. When they get to the car, the woman who dropped the note in their lap declines to review their letter of introduction³, establishes herself as their chaperon⁴, tells them that she rescued them from drinking the tea that had been sitting in front of them in the tea-room and which contained laudanum, and admonishes them to stop asking all the wrong questions.

The narrator’s name in Lemony Snicket.

Who is the woman? Why does she want to meet him? How did he know he would need a folding ladder in the bathroom and when did he hide it there? Why did he need a chaperon? Who were those people pretending to be his parents in the tea room and who filled his tea with an opiate?

What is going on here?

Only one of those questions is the right question. It is a question that permeates the entire series. Just as you think you know what is happening, Snicket’s tale takes a left turn and you end up somewhere else, asking different questions.

It keeps you on your toes.

If you read these books – and I am not saying that you shouldn’t do that – you will experience many spine-tingling scenes and narrow escapes while you relentlessly pursue your ever-changing objective. You will be exposed to vocabulary, facts, adults who lie to children, children who put themselves in danger and narrowly escape, a town undergoing a crisis, friends who lie to you, and Bombinating Beasts. You will fall in love with the wrong girl, the kind of girl who walks into your life like a San Francisco fog, lingers until she get what she came for, and fades into the horizon taking your heart with her.

Just like this book.

Should you read it? is also a wrong question because you already know the answer.

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1. I just noticed for the first time that the copywrite page of this book contains the following disclaimer: The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the pubilsher. I had never seen this warning on a copywrite page before – perhaps it is everywhere now, but I suspect LB just knows Lemony Snicket’s tendencies. ↩︎
2. When Millennials starting going on job interviews, we started hearing rumors that parents were actually going on job interviews with their children. I couldn’t believe it – until an HR professional that I knew said it had actually happened to her. Now these rumors are starting again about Zoomers. I will tell you right now that, with only a few exceptions, if someone allowed their parents to accompany them on a job interview with me, I would consider that a disqualifying factor. ↩︎
3. “I know who you are.” ↩︎
4. Think handler, like in Deighton or Lustbader. ↩︎