I enjoyed the first.....seven or eight books in this series, but it got more and more confusing, creating more questions than it answered. The books got longer and longer, with less action, so that the later books weren't nearly as fun to read. It was so repetitive. As I got to the last 2 books, I was getting really frustrated because I was tired of not getting any answers and things going on for several books. My daughter has not read the books, but watched the TV series, and she kept asking me if I knew what the schism was about yet. No, not yet.....they keep talking about it, but we don't know what it was about. Oh, well have you gotten to the sugar bowl? Yes, but we don't know where it is or what's in it. Ok, it will be explained soon. But it never was. So I'm guessing that in the TV adaptation they decided to fix the things that people really didn't like about the book series.
The moral of the story seems to be that the world is full of horrible people and also a few not AS horrible people, but still there are no really good people.
We don't find out what happened to a majority of the people. The characters are all just left behind somewhere along the way and we never see them again. They all come together at the hotel, and then that's the last we know....we don't know anything that happened to anyone other than the Beaudelairs, Count Olaf, and Kit.
And the big spoiler at the end with the last word, I told my daughter that's what I thought after book....4 maybe?
But what was in the sugar bowl? What was the schism about? Why did some people end up starting fires? What was the point of the fires? Why is Lemony Snicket documenting the lives of the children and why was he so desperate to get the story out there? Who was trying to stop him and why? What was his relation to the children? Who is the Duchess of Winnepeg and why is the ring special?