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Wintersmith: Tiffany Aching, witch in training, steps into a dance on impulse and finds the spirit of Winter courting her – which involves a lot of storms and a giant Tiffany iceberg, among other things. Pratchett spectacularly evokes that first stirring of sexual power, felt long before it’s understood, in a young girl, and the way that it gets confused with romance. Tiffany is as sensible a girl as you’ll ever meet, but she’s not a machine. And her great potential for power makes her early experimentation dangerous to the whole world. I’m not a huge fan of the Tiffany books – give me another Night Watch book any day – but this is well-told; as with Pratchett’s best, he turns fantasy into emotional reality, and he honors the working world with his descriptions of the mundane but vital tasks that witches need to do to be good. Abigail Nussbaum has a more detailed, less favorable review here.
Lemony Snicket, The End: The burning question for the last few volumes has been whether Snicket would unravel all the tangled skeins of the past and explain the conspiracies that brought the Baudelaires to such grief. Now that it’s over, I find myself unsure how to deal with the resolution of this series of unfortunate events. Of course not everything can be explained – but in fact hardly anything is, and we get a few extra layers of mystery in this last volume as well. I think that Snicket succeeds in making the unknowability of the past, and the necessity of continuing on into the future anyway, the main theme of the ending, but it leaves me feeling … melancholy, if not really dissatisfied. This book is a lot less funny but just as clever as earlier volumes; the names of the castaways alone are a referential free-for-all. In my mind, the Baudelaires go on to rejoin the Quagmires, and eventually they live contented lives, at least until the next disaster. But how would we ever really know the ending?
Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters: More artifact than book, this lavishly produced volume contains correspondence between Lemony and Beatrice and between Beatrice and Lemony, as well as a pull-out poster and letters you could punch out of various pages to play with. It adds a marginal bit of information to the basic story, but it’s probably not worth it unless you really, really like trying to add to the mosaic; while this book is as baroque as any aspect of the series, it lacks the full humor and wordplay that are my favorite characteristics of the books and that can only really come when you have a third-party narrator, who is instead a first-person correspondent here.
Lemony Snicket, The End: The burning question for the last few volumes has been whether Snicket would unravel all the tangled skeins of the past and explain the conspiracies that brought the Baudelaires to such grief. Now that it’s over, I find myself unsure how to deal with the resolution of this series of unfortunate events. Of course not everything can be explained – but in fact hardly anything is, and we get a few extra layers of mystery in this last volume as well. I think that Snicket succeeds in making the unknowability of the past, and the necessity of continuing on into the future anyway, the main theme of the ending, but it leaves me feeling … melancholy, if not really dissatisfied. This book is a lot less funny but just as clever as earlier volumes; the names of the castaways alone are a referential free-for-all. In my mind, the Baudelaires go on to rejoin the Quagmires, and eventually they live contented lives, at least until the next disaster. But how would we ever really know the ending?
Lemony Snicket, The Beatrice Letters: More artifact than book, this lavishly produced volume contains correspondence between Lemony and Beatrice and between Beatrice and Lemony, as well as a pull-out poster and letters you could punch out of various pages to play with. It adds a marginal bit of information to the basic story, but it’s probably not worth it unless you really, really like trying to add to the mosaic; while this book is as baroque as any aspect of the series, it lacks the full humor and wordplay that are my favorite characteristics of the books and that can only really come when you have a third-party narrator, who is instead a first-person correspondent here.
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Well put, and something I've been confronted with quite recently as I've spent some time reading my adolescent journals!