Who Could That Be At This Hour? by Lemony Snicket
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This is not-exactly-a-prequel to Snicket’s previous A series of unfortunate events, narrated in first person by Snicket himself and set in his formative years as an apprentice to a secretive organization which we can only presume to be VFD.
Who could it be at this hour? presents itself as an ordinary mystery/detective novel, but followers of the Baudelaires’s misadventures will not be surprised to find that there are layers within layers of plots and mysteries and secrets, and that questions (wrong or right as they might be) will rarely get an answer. As Snicket himself would say, the map is not the territory.
The novel is, as usual, laid out in beautiful prose, and the style perfectly resembles that of a precocious 13-year old trying to write a boilerplate novel, finding the delicate balance between child-like and adult.
The only flaw in this book is that it’s way too short, and I can’t wait for the next volume to come out!