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Post by Christmas Chief on Sept 21, 2012 18:15:38 GMT -5
The photograph definitely looks more real than the digitized cover we've been seeing for months. Part of it is the papery texture, but other bits are, like the gold plate, quite tasteful. Say - could this be the reason the illustrations themselves are far more simplistic than those on the interior? Printing limitations?
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Post by Dante on Sept 22, 2012 4:49:09 GMT -5
That strikes me as unlikely, but it does look a little better in real life.
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Post by B. on Sept 22, 2012 15:32:15 GMT -5
This review appeared on Tumblr this evening, by someone who apparently has their hands on an advance copy: Who Could That Be At This Hour? by Lemony Snicket - 5/5 It seems that all of the books I’ve had time to read have been worthy of perfect or near-perfect ratings. I’m not going to reveal much of the plot of this one though, so don’t expect that from my review. I’m secretive today. This is the first of Snicket’s new All The Wrong Questions series, and it is a great start. I’ve always thought that Snicket wouldn’t be able to do better than A Series of Unfortunate Events, but this new series is already some tough competition. I’m sure many of you have read the first chapter already (if you haven’t, read it here please), so many of you already understand that this series could be as clever as ASOUE is. And, honestly, after reading the book in its entirety I can tell you that it really is a clever and enjoyable read. The illustrations are beautiful and help the novel appeal to the younger set, but the mature and unbelievably clever (for lack of a better word) writing style keeps the novel appealing to people of all ages. This book made me smile, gasp, and even warm my heart a little at some points. I know, I didn’t expect that of a Snicket novel either. But, trust me, his morbidity is still there. The book has dark turns and beautifully misunderstood characters, and it’s going to be a real hit. I’ve gushed about this long enough, so please pick up a copy once it releases on 23rd October. Buy a copy, rent a copy, start to read a copy in a bookstore and hide it behind shelves so you can come back and finish it later. This book is worthwhile.
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Post by Dante on Sept 22, 2012 15:53:14 GMT -5
How the Hell is everyone getting a hold of this book before we are?
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Post by Christmas Chief on Sept 22, 2012 18:31:44 GMT -5
Er, patience is a virtue? But wow, there's an entire month left. It seems so much closer than that. The positive reviews are cheering, though.
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Post by Christmas Chief on Sept 24, 2012 18:02:43 GMT -5
Another from goodreads.com, and rather lengthy, too. ~~~ Last year I was running a bookgroup for kids, ages 9-12, when the subject of children’s books adapted into films came up. We talked about the relative success of Harry Potter, the bewildering movie that was City of Ember, and the gorgeous credit sequence for A Series of Unfortunate Events. Then one of the younger members, probably around ten years of age, turned to me and asked in all seriousness, “Do you think they’ll ever make a movie out of The Spiderwick Chronicles?” I was momentarily floored. It’s not often that kids will remind me that their memories of pop culture are limited to their own experiences, but once in a while it happens. This girl couldn’t remember back five years to that very film adaptation. And why should she? She was five then! So when I see a new Lemony Snicket series acting as a kind of companion to the aforementioned A Series of Unfortunate Events I wonder how it will play out. The original series was popular around the time of that Spiderwick movie. Does that mean that the new series will founder, or will it be so successful that it brings renewed interest to the previous, still in print and relatively popular, books? Personally, I haven’t a clue. All I know is that the latest Lemony Snicket series All the Wrong Questions is a work of clever references, skintight writing, and a deep sense of melancholy that mimics nothing else out there on the market for kids today. That's a good thing.
To be a success in Snicket’s line of work it’s important to know how to ask the right questions. And this is a problem since Snicket finds it difficult doing precisely that. He was supposed to meet his contact in the city. Instead, he finds himself whisked away to the country to a dying town called Stain’d-by-the-Sea. Once a bustling harbor, the town’s water was removed leaving behind a creepy seaweed forest and an ink business that won’t be around much longer. With his incompetent mentor S. Theodora Markson he’s there to solve the mystery of a stolen statue. Never mind that the statue wasn’t stolen, its owners don’t care who has it, and their client isn’t even a real person. When Snicket finds a girl looking for her father and learns the name of the insidious Hangfire things start to get interesting, not to mention dangerous. Can multiple mysteries be solved even if you keep following the wrong paths? Snicket’s about to find out.
What is more dangerous: Evil or stupidity? It’s a trick question since there’s nothing “or” about it. If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from the Snicket universe, it is that while evil is undesirable, stupidity is downright damaging. Many is the Series of Unfortunate Events book that would show clear as crystal that while stupid and ignorant people may not necessarily be evil in and of themselves, they do more to aid in evil than any routine bad guy ever could hope for. In All the Wrong Questions the adults in charge are still inane, but at least the kids have a bit of autonomy from them. Our hero, the young Snicket, is still omnipotent to a certain degree, and only cares to share personal information with the reader when the plot requires that he do so. And because the book is a mystery, he’s almost required to move about at will. He just happens to be moving between stupid people much of the time.
Of course the trouble with having Lemony himself as your protagonist is that the guy is infamous for never giving you good news. If adult Snicket is the kind of guy who warns off readers (in a voice that I’ve always connected to Ben Stein) because of his own sad worldview, reading this series means that we are going to see failure at work. We saw failure at work with the Baudelaires but with them it was always the fault of the universe using them as punching bags more than their own inadequacies. That means that the author’s trick with this book is to keep it from disintegrating into depression even as its hero ultimately screws up (yet seems to be doing the right thing the whole time). How do you pull this dichotomy off? Humor. Thank god for humor. Because like other post-modern children’s mysteries (Mac Barnett’s The Brixton Brothers, most notably) being funny is the key to simultaneously referencing old mystery tropes while commenting on them.
I always had a certain amount of difficulty figuring out how exactly to describe A Series of Unfortunate Events. The term “Gothic” just didn’t quite cut it. PoMo Gothic, maybe. Or Meta-Gothic. Dunno. The All the Wrong Questions series makes it much easier on me. This book is noir. Noiry noir. Noiry noirish noirable noir. As if to confirm this the author drops in names like Dashiell and Mitchum, which like all of Snicket’s jokes will fly over the heads of all the child readers and 82.5% of the adult readers as well (I kept a tally for a while of the references I knew that I myself was not getting, then just sort of stopped after a while). There are dames, or at least the 12-year-old equivalent of dames. There are Girl Fridays. There are mistaken identities and creepy abandoned buildings. There are also butlers who do things, but that’s more of a drawing room murder mystery genre trope, so we’re going to disregard it here.
Let us talk Seth. The man comes to fill the shoes left by Brett Helquist. He’s a clever choice since there is nothing even slightly Helquistian to this comic legend. This is, to the best of my knowledge Seth’s first work for children, though there may well be some obscure Canadian work of juvenilia in his past that I’ve missed. His work on the cover is remarkable in and of itself, but in the book he works primarily in chapter headings and the occasional full-page layout. The author must have relayed to Mr. Seth what images to do sometimes because there is a picture at the beginning and a picture at the end that continue the story above and beyond the written portions. As for the spreads inside, Seth does an admirable job of ever concealing young Snicket’s face. He also lends a funny lightness to the proceedings, not something I would have expected walking into the novel.
There is a passage in the book where Snicket reflects on his life that just kills me. It comes a quarter of the way through the novel and is the clearest indication to the reader that the action in this novel happened a long time ago. It goes on for a while until finally ending with, “Stretched out in front of me was my time as an adult, and then a skeleton, and then nothing except perhaps a few books on a few shelves.” Put another way, this isn’t your average mystery novel for kids. It’s not even your average Lemony Snicket novel. It is what it is, the first part in a new series containing a familiar character that need not be previously known to readers. I have no idea if kids will gravitate towards it, but if you’ve a hankering to recommend a beautifully written if uncommon mystery to kids that ask for that sort of thing (and they do, man, they do) hand this over. Worse case scenario, they don’t like it. Best case scenario it blows their little minds. Blew mine anyway. Good stuff.
~~~
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Post by Poe's Coats Host Toast on Sept 25, 2012 6:26:40 GMT -5
A-ha, so Snicket's face is indeed concealed throughout the illustrations of the book/series. Kinda expected that, but still, this is the first time it's confirmed. I also really like that Seth's pictures "at the beginning and (...) at the end (...) continue the story above and beyond the written portions." Just like Helquist's first and final pictures in ASoUE. I loved those details hinting towards the next book. Made me excited as f*ck, for the lack of a more appropriate term.
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Post by Dante on Sept 25, 2012 8:02:18 GMT -5
Even though I had already deduced as much, some of the plot elements discussed in that review are spoilers. Perhaps you should think about tagging it, Sherry Ann?
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Post by Christmas Chief on Sept 25, 2012 15:01:46 GMT -5
I wasn't sure. Personally I don't see anything we haven't seen in teasers and the released chapters, but at your suggestion I'll fold it away just in case.
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Post by B. on Sept 25, 2012 15:15:56 GMT -5
Does this mean that there aren't full page illustrations every other chapter as we originally thought?
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Post by Christmas Chief on Sept 25, 2012 15:21:54 GMT -5
Does this mean that there aren't full page illustrations every other chapter as we originally thought? I considered the same possibility, and I think "occasional" could still mean "every other chapter." I'm not sure if they're going to establish a pattern with the illustrations as they did with ASOUE, but it might be worth noting the crowd illustration from the beginning of the book might function as a frontispiece rather than occurring mid-chapter, meaning the only full-page drawing we have is in the third chapter.
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Post by B. on Sept 25, 2012 15:28:32 GMT -5
"Occasional" is a loose term, although the more I think about it, it seems likely that the crowd scene in the train station is the frontispiece mentioned in the interview above. I can't see any reason as to why they wouldn't include the frontispiece in the chapter previews they issued.
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Post by Dante on Sept 26, 2012 15:54:40 GMT -5
Antenora's pointed me to this review: Book Scene -- The return of Lemony Snicket By Adam Jones For On magazine
Lemony Snicket is the pen name of author Daniel Handler, but the character Lemony Snicket has already narrated a series of well-known books. You may have heard of them?
Now, a new series by the author goes back in time; it’s a hard-boiled detective story. A flat-footed reporter (named Moxie Mallahan), a shifty dame (Ellington Feint) and an invisible, lurking villain all come together in the abandoned town of Stain’d-by-the-Sea. They’re all part of a mystery confusing a 13-year-old member of a secret agency. The agent’s name? Lemony Snicket, once again.
The new series is called "All the Wrong Questions," and it turns out the job Snicket has, as an apprentice in the agency, mostly consists of asking the wrong questions of his chaperone, S. Theodora Markson. Theodora puts Snicket down the path of the secret of "The Bombinating Beast," but what’s the story behind Snicket’s missing parents, or the coded messages he sends through interlibrary loans? And why did he ask to work with a chaperone ranked 52nd out of 52?
"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" is also about books and newspapers; anything written in ink on paper. Stain’d-by-the-Sea is a town that made its fortune mining ink from squids kept in underwater caves (don’t worry, it’s not that big of a secret; you find out about it in the first few pages). It was once the home of a proud newspaper, and the only remaining reporter’s eyes are now newsprint gray, "like they’d once been black but somebody had washed them." And in this strange town, the only place where Snicket finds a home for himself is the library. There, he learns from a cool sublibrarian that sometimes books are not labeled as they should be and that "in every library there is a single book that can answer the question that burns like a fire in the mind."
In the story, Theodora tells Snicket what she means when she uses words like, "redundant," "penchant," "reticence" and "The Clusterous Forest." On his own, Snicket finds out what a hawser is, that "the map is not the territory," and how "for the duration" can "mean nothing at all." But what he finds out is that knowing the definition of a word does not mean that you know what question it answers, or if that question is the right one.
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Post by Dante on Oct 3, 2012 9:12:56 GMT -5
Another review, which I started seeing everywhere quoted as just one line: "Please, it’s Lemony Snicket. Enough said." Booklist.com:--- Oh, Lemony Snicket. How you confound us. For instance, in this book, the first of the All the Wrong Questions series, you give us so many unmoored happenings that readers may be inclined to believe they’ve landed in the middle of the second book. True, we will learn you’re an almost-13-year-old boy and that you escape your parents (or are they your parents?!) in a tea room to meet the woman with whom you’ll apprentice. And then you and S. Theodora Markson (what does the S stand for?) make your way to a sea town, now devoid of the ink for which it’s famous, and deserted by its residents, to find a statue rather like the Maltese Falcon, only it’s the Bombinating Beast. Someone is waiting for you back home, but who? What’s this secret program you seem to be a part of? Who cares about the Bombinating Beast? (You may take that comment any way you wish.) But just as when you were with those charming Baudelaire children, the adventures roll and one can only speculate what’s around the corner. Not that it will do any good. Kudos to Seth for the marvelous woodcut art. The pictures seem to hold clues. Or do they? HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Please, it’s Lemony Snicket. Enough said. — Ilene Cooper--- www.booklistonline.com/-8220-Who-Could-That-Be-at-This-Hour-8221-Lemony-Snicket/pid=5690101
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Antenora
Detriment Deleter
Fiendish Philologist
Put down that harpoon gun, in the name of these wonderful birds!
Posts: 15,891
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Post by Antenora on Oct 12, 2012 16:53:20 GMT -5
The New York Times has a review which is quite favorable and also reveals a few new details and quotations: Unsolved Mysteries ‘All the Wrong Questions,’ a Lemony Snicket Series By CHRISTOPHER HEALY Published: October 12, 2012
You can’t blame a mystery lover for approaching “ ‘Who Could That Be at This Hour?’ ” with trepidation. Lemony Snicket has burned us before. Like “The X-Files,” “Lost” and countless other conspiracy-driven sagas, Snicket’s 13 volumes of “A Series of Unfortunate Events” left fans with far more questions than answers. What was the true purpose of the clandestine organization known as V.F.D.? Why was everyone terrified of that question-mark-shaped shadow in the ocean? What was hidden in that MacGuffin of a sugar bowl everybody wanted? But in contrast to the frustratingly finite television series mentioned above, “Unfortunate Events” gave readers a glimmer of hope. Because the series’s pseudonymous author was also one of its characters — and he never went away. In the six years since “The End,” Lemony Snicket has been out there, a living spinoff, whose mere existence has held the lingering promise of “More to come. . . .”
“ ‘Who Could That Be at This Hour?’ ” is the first chapter of “All the Wrong Questions,” a new mock-autobiographical series that recounts the almost 13-year-old Lemony’s apprenticeship with an enigmatic secret society — a prequel to “Unfortunate Events.” And while that first series worked as both a tribute to and parody of Gothic literature, this new one does the same for noir detective fiction. The book opens with the pulpy, “There was a town, and there was a girl and there was a theft.” Its “Maltese Falcon”-esque plot, which pivots around a missing statue, has more twists than a soft-serve ice cream cone. And young Lemony’s descriptions of the people he meets are hard-boiled enough to make Philip Marlowe proud (“Green eyes she had, and hair so black it made the night look pale”). There’s even a character named Dashiell.
However, this book is no mere exercise in genre spoofing; this is, after all, a Lemony Snicket novel. That means you get a delightfully eccentric supporting cast, which here includes a tween reporter named Moxie who dresses like Annie Hall and uses words like “gimcrack.” It also means you get snarkily dry humor — the lobby of a lackluster hotel, for instance, displays a bowl of peanuts “that were either salted or dusty” — and unapologetic blasts of absurdity, like a pair of prepubescent taxi drivers (Pip steers, while Squeak works the pedals).
And, as with all Snicket novels, you get a narrator with a penchant for defining every 10-cent word he uses. Over the course of 13 “Unfortunate Events” books, this practice grew tiresome — a word that here means I wish he hadn’t done it so much. However, in “ ‘Who Could That Be at This Hour?’ ” we are made privy to the genesis of Lemony’s defining habit: He himself is subjected to it by an adult spy tutor who sorely underestimates his abilities. In a pleasing meta twist, young Lemony echoes the kind of gimme-some-credit grumbles that may have been voiced by real-life Snicket readers (as when our hero gripes, “I know what penchant means”).
All of it serves to make the tween Lemony a lively and endearingly peculiar protagonist, the kind of figure who would be at home in a Wes Anderson film. At one point Lemony reveals that anyone who wanted to torture him for information would simply need to get his socks wet.
But what about all those unsolved mysteries from “Unfortunate Events”? The book’s pages are peppered with tempting maybe-clues — a reference to a well-known character, the mention of a mythical sea beast whose body curls up like a question mark. Are these allusions or illusions? It’s all part of the game that Snicket plays with his readers. The puzzle, he seems to tell us, is more important than its solution.
However, there is a complete, self-contained mystery within “ ‘Who Could That Be at This Hour?’ ” By the end, you will know the identity of the statue thief. And you will have had a great time getting there. But don’t dream for a second that you’ll finish the book without at least a dozen new unanswered riddles. And will those conundrums be resolved in this series? Will any of them truly tie in to the previous books? Will the success of this series really depend on providing some sort of closure? Or am I asking all the wrong questions?
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