The End by Daniel Handler - Book Review

The End, unlike the previous installments, contains fourteen chapters, and starts with the Baudelaires arriving at the shores of a mysterious island, where people don’t drink anything but the “coconut cordial”.

The unique writing style of Handler again outshines the plot of the book.

Although this book offers nothing to console those who wish to find explanations for the mysteries, it will make them realize that you don’t have to look for answers and that you can’t always know everything the world is hiding from you; thus, the predominant vagueness of the whole series is not left off and instead, Handler offers an emotional ending for both the children and their nemesis, Count Olaf.

For the first time ever, Count Olaf’s disguise does not work as it usually does. The people of the island, though they might be a bit more intelligent than other people the Baudelaires have met, won’t listen to the voice of reason, which emanated at the time from the Baudelaires.

Count Olaf’s obsession with their fortune still drives him, but due to the blurry lines between good and evil, we discover that Olaf is not a bad person. In fact, he once was a decent person like their parents and guardians.

However, misfortunes turned him into a hungry-for-money-and-vengeance count. Another piece of information regarding their parent’s work is offered, but it does little to explain the mysteriousness shrouding the VFD and more to feed fan theories.

The “end of The End” as Handler likes to put it, is heartbreaking and unexpected, and if you accept what Handler is trying to drill into the minds of his readers, the book might be the perfect closure to this story.

Handler endows his books with many allegories that you might not be able to catch on to, but they are still fun to read about later.

Other than that, as you look at the last few pages of the book without getting the answers you wanted, you might think that Handler made the mistake of many amateur writers, which is not writing a good ending and tying all the loose ends, but this is probably the effect that Handler was going for. He was trying to prove that, yes, the end is messy and so is life.