Review: Who Could That Be At This Hour?

Who Could That Be At This Hour? by Lemony Snicket

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



I definitely consider myself a fan of Daniel Handler in all his iterations. As of late, to be honest, I've found his Handler-penned fiction to be the best part, although my love of the Series of Unfortunate Events knows few bounds. The Lemony Snicket character comes from those books, and has taken a bit of a life of its own - Snicket has written a few non-Series titles (including two very entertaining picture books), and this new series is back in the, uh, traditional Snicketverse.

It's just okay. I'll put that out there. While the Series books were fun because it was all a little absurd and the characters were really fun, this is more of a traditional mystery that stars a character we already know - in a way, it's like The Fourth Bear is to the Thursday Next books: nice to have, a good enough time, but hardly essential. As this is somewhat of an origin story for Snicket as well, we're lead on a wild goose chase of sorts.

That's ultimately what hurts this book for me. It's good enough, I suppose, but it lacked that sort of joy and fun that the Series had. It certainly tries to regain that magic from time to time, but ultimately fell short in a few ways.

Not a bad read per se, but certainly not one I'll be clamoring to revisit, either. Unfortunate.



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