"WHO COULD THAT BE AT THIS HOUR?" BOOK ONE OF ALL THE WRONG QUESTIONS by Lemony Snicket. Little Brown, 2012.
Lemony Snicket is astonished when a strange woman enters the Hemlock Tearoom and Stationery Shop and drops a note into his lap. he is instructed to crawl out of the bathroom window and meet her in the alley in 5 minutes. Off he goes and manages to make the deadline imposed by S. Theodora Markson to whom he will become an apprentice. Their first case, the Case of the Bombinating Beast will determine if Mr. Snicket can measure up. Of course, all is not at all what it seems to be or not to be.
Unlike Mr. Snicket, words are failing me as I try to capture accurately the wonder of this first book in a new series. I love it at the word level, the sentence level, the chapter level. I took my sweet time reading it because I wanted to make it last. I resisted turning down pages as I did not want to the book to be totally dog-eared. I even managed to curb the desire to tweet out lines such as this:
"It (a suit) had hung in my closet for weeks, like an empty person." p.2 Add in the Clusterous Forest in Staind-by-the-Sea, a young reporter named Moxie and another characters named "Feint" and a librarian who is Qwerty and you are not even close to understanding the treat that awaits readers within the covers of this book. In a time when we are all talking about close reading and complex texts, here is a book worthy of scrutiny.
Bravo, Mr. Snicket (both of you) and please, sir, may I have some more?
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